In this week's Talent and HR News Weekly Roundup, we're featuring insight on employee perks and more. Enjoy!
1) Employees underwhelmed with wellness plans from Employee Benefit Advisor
If employers want to attract and retain the best talent, they might want to first look in a seemingly obvious place: their benefit offerings and wellness plans.
According to a recent survey of full-time professionals from One Medical Group, two out of three employees would rather have better health and wellness benefits than other types of perks. Nearly 60% of the 1,000 professionals surveyed said employee benefits are “very important” to how they feel about their job and their employer, and 36% said benefits are “somewhat important.”
2) How companies keep employee perks hot during the Summer from Employee Benefits News
Summer means fun in the sun for employees and their families, and more and more employers are providing additional flex time and summer scheduling to allow workers to enjoy the warm weather and spend their work hours recharged and refreshed. From flex time to company softball leagues to early dismissals for good surf days, employers are rewarding employees with summer benefits and perks that fit their company culture.
According to the SHRM Employee Benefits Survey, 17% of employers offer seasonal scheduling. Employers may offer Fridays off or close early on those days, which not only gives employees a reward, it saves money on air conditioning and electricity. Further, employers now offer employees an annual company outing, such as a picnic, up from 55% in 2012 to 64% in 2016.
3) Why You Should Interview People Who Turn Down a Job with Your Company from Harvard Business Review
Successfully competing for top talent involves both selling jobs to the best candidates and retaining the highest performing incumbents. In order to be seen as an employer of choice with a compelling value proposition for employees, many companies measure turnover and conduct exit interviews with departing employees to gather feedback about the experiences people had working there and the reasons why they’re leaving. But a less common practice is to track how many people turn down job offers at your company, and an even less common practice is to actually gather feedback from candidates who receive offers but don’t accept them. Like “exit interviews” these “declined offer” interviews can yield a lot of information about your own organization as well as valuable data about your industry and competitors.
4) The Counterintuitive Reason Why You Need To Stop Promoting High Performers from Fast Company
You should only promote someone after they've proved themselves, right? Wrong, says this talent management expert. You have a low-performing employee and a high-performing employee both up for the same promotion: Who do you promote? It's no contest, right?
If you said the high performer, you may be about to make one of the oldest mistakes in the book. How can that be? Because you never asked yourself which one has the most potential. And that's because managers are told over and over to only promote people who've proved their worth—those you who know are already up to the task, not those who you suspect will be.
The truth is that rewarding high-performing employees is the easy choice—as well as the lazy choice. And it's one that may come back to haunt you, especially at the higher levels, as you bulk up your senior management team with people who can perform but can’t necessarily lead.
5) HR Increasingly Adopting Cloud Technology from Bloomberg BNA - Human Resources Report
The increased availability of cloud technology to perform HR processes has greatly benefited the bottom line for HR departments, both for costs and efficiency, according to new research released by Mercer.HR departments are now looking at cloud-based economic models of human resources information systems (HRIS), which have vast implications for how HR can budget for technology costs, streamline HR processes and allow employees to work anytime and anywhere, Katherine Jones, a leader in Mercer's North American Talent Business, said July 27.
Mercer found that out of the 500 participants in its recent study, 45 percent had implemented a new HRIS within the past five years; of those, the majority had deployed that system in the cloud, using the increasingly popular Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model. Additionally, 34 percent of study participants planned to implement a new HRIS within the next three years. These systems were reported to provide higher quality data, better user experiences and increased analytic capabilities, Mercer found.
6) Think Servant Leadership Is Too Good To Be True? Why It's The Best Investment A Business Can Make from Forbes
Looking to strengthen your team at work, both in productivity and camaraderie? Chances are you’ve tried the Friday morning doughnut run, Bring Your Pet to Work Day, and even employee teamwork retreats—and yet that unique bond among your employees just isn’t there. But here’s an idea that’s likely to be the best investment you could ever make: Servant leadership, in which a company and employees join together in providing hands-on service to create a better community and world.
Kathleen O'Brien (@kathleen_eliz) is a Lead Consultant & Project Manager for exaqueo, a workforce consultancy that helps organizations build their cultures, employer brands and talent strategies. Contact exaqueo to learn more about our employer brand innovation, workforce research, and recruiting strategy offerings.