Employee Benefits Blog

We get many questions about how to increase employee engagement. While we believe that giving your workforce best-in-class HR benefits is one of the best ways to satisfy many workers, another way is to find ways to motivate workers who succeed better on a team.

As a manager, spend time looking for ways to help the team function as a whole. Use part of your time for planning positive activities, such as team-building and brainstorming sessions. You should also work to identify what makes groups of people function well together. In this post, we will examine three common issues with team performance that can reduce employee engagement: problems with communication, problems with goal setting, and personality conflicts.

Video is a powerful medium. Moving pictures and sound capture our attention better than any other communication vehicle. When deployed in an office environment, video is a terrific choice for keeping employees engaged in otherwise dry topics, such as codes of conduct training or employee benefits.

Well executed, video can set the right mood and tone for any message - and it can make a business come across as far more professional and polished.

Many companies are already using video, most especially during their on-boarding process - new hire employees typically see their first corporate video within a few days of being hired. Companies at the forefront of this trend know that video effectively and consistently conveys messages, reduces costs, and sets the right tone for their brand.

Here are several other reasons to make the use of video more prevalent in your organization.

Key Takeaways From MetLife's Employee Benefit Trends Study

The recently published MetLife Benefit Trends Study contains some very interesting and perhaps surprising statistics regarding the annual benefits enrollment process.

We encourage you to check it out for yourself (it’s a very quick read). Here are a few of our key take-aways:

• Smaller companies (under 500 employees) have a lower percentage of employees engaged in the annual benefits enrollment process than larger ones.

Manage Staffing Costs Thru Employee Engagement

Despite a strong economic recovery, the Affordable Care Act is pressuring employers to find an optimal balance between total employee compensation and annual company profits. 

One of the best ways for companies to manage staffing costs is by improving employee retention, reducing turn-over and focusing on strategies to retain existing, skilled employees. Here’s why this is so important and what companies can do about it.

The Cost of Hiring

It’s easy to forget than the true cost of hiring a new employee is far more than just salary and employee benefits, which usually total in the 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary range (meaning that a salary plus benefits package for a $50,000/year employee could equal $62,500 to $70,000).