Category: Commentary & Opinion

Another day at the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2017 conference in New Orleans. Day 2 brought me a lot of opportunities to speak to HR professionals about everything from the skills gap to benefits strategy to financial wellness. Tropical Storm #Cindy is also coming in, so potentially we’ll all be stuck together for a much, much longer time. We’ll see!

These are some of the ideas I’ve come across day 2:

Financial Wellness Over 20 Years: I spoke with Jeff Tulloch, vice president of MetLife’s PlanSmart program. MetLife has been developing this financial wellness platform over the past 20 years, and just in the past three years, they’ve seen a large spike in interest in this area, Tulloch said. What’s caused this spike, he added, is that employees are stressed and employers have realized that stress is a drain for everyone.

What companies have been doing well with financial wellness is education, he said, but there are two more important areas that we’ll need to see moving forward: motivation and access. By motivation, he meant that HR practitioners could “be more courageous endorsers of what they offer and help their employees take the next steps.”

By access, he meant a wide range of access points for information and advice, not only digital. There’s also human interaction, like an on-site financial adviser or a call center someone can access during open enrollment.

“When we get those three things, education, motivation and access, we see that people are in the position to act,” said Tulloch.

A Little Nudge: Lazlo Bock, former senior vice president of people operations at Google/Alphabet gave a speech that, although not about health/wellness, did offer one tidbit of advice on wellness. He called it “nudging.” The idea behind it is that a small change in the work environment can make a larger impact and that businesses can nudge employees in the right direction. The trick is to not get too into micro-managing. You can’t remove employee choice, but you can lightly nudge them to make a choice that’s better for them.

Bock gave an example of an office based in New York. It offered healthy (nuts, fruit, etc.) and unhealthy snacks (M&M’s), all in opaque containers. The company made a small change in presentation and began putting the unhealthy snacks in yellow containers. The result was that employees consumed a significantly smaller number of calories in the following weeks. They were less likely to dig into the M&M’s in the differentiated, yellow containers than the opaque ones. The choice was still there, but perhaps they began thinking about their choice more when the healthy and unhealthy options looked different.

I don’t know if this same result would happen to any company who uses this exact opaque container/ yellow container model, but the idea behind it is solid.

New Legislation: Lisa Horn, director of congressional affairs and leader of SHRM’s Workplace Flexibility Initiative, spoke about a new work-flex bill being introduced to Congress. They worked with U.S. Rep. Mimi Walters, R-California, to craft it.

The bill is still being changed and tweaked, so I won’t go into specifics. Here’s the gist, though. It’s a workplace flexibility bill that does something about both paid leave and flexibility in the workplace. Currently, there is nothing on a national level addressing these, but many states and cities have their own individual rules, which causes problems for national companies with a presence in multiple cities or states.

In this bill, if an employer voluntarily chooses to adopt these standards, they will be deemed to have satisfied their state and local mandates. The idea behind the bill, Horn added, is that it would be more generous for employees than the state/local mandates.

I’ll be interested to see what happens with this and how far it gets. Also, what those TBD details are like how many days of paid leave an employee would get.

SHRM hopes to officially introduce it after Congress’ July 4 recess.

“HR is Like Golf”: I found this entertaining and something that honestly could apply to any job. This is what one man said when he was asked what he does when things get hard in HR. You can take 99 bad shots and one good shot, he said, and it’s that one good one that keeps you coming back to play golf.

Moving Forward from a Bad Rep: In one session, a woman said the hardest part of HR is overcoming a bad reputation, like with the bad press HR got in the Uber sexual harassment fiasco. She added that as an HR practitioner, every new organization she works at is an opportunity to tell a new HR story and change what HR looks like. Then the employees who work there will have a different impression and HR and carry that with them where they go next. “I can only control what my HR world looks like and what my people experience,” she said, mentioning the importance of starting small, focusing on your own organization and letting other proactive HR people do the same at their own company.

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Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

The 2017 Society for Human Resource Management conference is in New Orleans this year, which I love. I got to stay with my sister and her 60-pound pit bull for a couple of days before entering Conference-land. We went on long walks in the heat, took a yoga class and ate some good food. We spent one Friday evening at a small Irish pub, where none of these non-HR professionals knew much about HR at all — but it still came up in conversation.

This is going to be really obvious, but benefits truly impact people’s lives, even if people don’t regularly think about HR. One person I talked to that night is using his unlimited PTO to take a motorcycle trip across the country. Another person got to leave work early that afternoon and have some Abita beers/frozen Irish coffees with us because of a policy at her office; take shorter lunch breaks throughout the week and you can leave early Friday. We didn’t mean to have this conversation about workplace benefits, but there it was.

This first night of SHRM’s conference, the HR association released its 2017 “Employee Benefits” survey, which cemented this feeling that benefits really do make up a large part of the employee value proposition.

A couple of statistics stuck out to me at first: one-third of surveyed organizations have increased their benefits offerings in the past year in an effort to be an employer of choice and attract the best people. Not surprising, of course. What interested me was that the value of benefits accounted for, on average, about 30 percent of an employee’s total compensation (30 percent in private industry; 37 percent in state and local government).

This was relevant because of an article I read about how employees shouldn’t just negotiate for a higher salary. Negotiating for alternative forms of compensation like benefits is just as important. This article pointed out areas like flex time, transportation and student loan repayment, which an employee can ask for if, for example, the company is not in the financial situation to offer a raise.

Wellness was a benefit that saw a large increase in the survey. A quarter of these companies have increased their wellness benefits, and three-quarters said their wellness program was “somewhat to very effective on reducing health care costs.”

I’ve seen statistics like this a lot, and they disagree greatly with other stats that say wellness programs don’t save money at all. There are very logical arguments on both sides of this wellness coin. From what I can tell, employee wellness programs aren’t going anywhere, whether they notably reduce employers’ and employees’ health care costs or not. What they do is help give people resources to make healthy changes in their lives.

Interestingly, in the wellness space, fewer employers offer smoking cessation programs than before. The person presenting this information, SHRM Vice President of Research Shonna Waters, did mention that “sitting is the new standing” line we’ve been hearing about so much. While smoking cessation programs are in the decline in the employer space, sit-stand desks are spiking upward, from 13 percent in 2013 to 44 percent in 2017.

My take on this? Since the “Mad Men” era 50 years ago, smoking’s prevalence in, well, everywhere has declined. People are also much more educated on the health risks of smoking. No one can pretend it’s harmless anymore.

In an employer wellness program, wouldn’t it be more valuable to focus on a problem that’s less understood and more prevalent in 2017? Even though people still smoke, other harmful habits are growing in prevalence. Those problems deserve a little attention, too, and many people could use the educational opportunity.

Three more days of the conference and so many more benefits related sessions to go! I’ll be sharing my takeaways from sessions on this Workforce blog and at my twitter handle @andie_burjek. Any questions in the benefits/wellness space, comment or tweet at me and I’ll scope out the answer in this room of an estimated 15k HR professionals.

Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.