CSI Benefits Industry News

By Andrea Davis

March 23, 2010|

U.S. health insurers will have to focus on overseas expansion opportunities if they want continued high rates of growth and profitability, according to a study that explores trends toward an expanded role for private health insurance in other countries.

“U.S. health insurers have been successful at focusing almost exclusively on the U.S. market up until now,” says Sherry Manetta, an analyst at Conning Research & Consulting, which conducted the research. “However, the U.S. now accounts for 80% of the global health insurance market, while representing just 4.6% of the world’s population. Looking forward, both profit pressures at home and higher growth rates overseas will drive increased multinational expansion interest among U.S. health insurers,” Manetta adds.

According to the study, the U.S. health insurance market is forecasted to grow approximately 7% annually from 2009 to 2011. However, “operating margins, which declined to 3.1% in 2008, will continue to be under pressure as proposed health care reform solutions are implemented and health care cost trends continue to outpace general inflation. … Other countries provide opportunities for U.S. insurers to diversify geographically and to leverage the considerable investments already made in health insurance and managed care systems and processes,” researchers note.

Asia and Europe represent the best near-term opportunities for U.S. insurers, according to the report.

“U.S. insurers have built and are managing the world’s most complex managed health care system,” says Stephan Christiansen, director of research at Conning. “With this infrastructure and expertise, U.S. insurers have the potential to emerge as front-runners of a vast global managed health care system, should they decide to enter the competition already underway with Western European and Canadian multinational insurers

Employee Benefit News Article used by permission.

The human resources department traditionally spends a great deal of time developing written benefit information within the corporate communications structure. Most companies spent a great deal of resources on of general benefit information as well as summaries of health insurance or deductions are printed at the bottom of employee paychecks. Since the role of the HR department has evolved since the 1990s, when the department began to change its role in the workplace, employee benefit communication can be conducted in a number of different ways. The point of solid corporate communications strategies is to make sure that you are providing your employees with as much information as possible to be completely effective at their daily jobs.

If you’re running a smaller company, your HR department will most likely consist of one or two people, so it may be a little easier to have effective employee communications regarding things like changes in health care benefits or paycheck deductions. Corporate communication in the form of mass emails detailing these changes, or reminders to read the new information that will appear on the bottom of pay stubs will most likely suffice in these instances. It may also help to partner will smaller health insurance companies to meet the needs of your employees. In many cases, larger corporations that handle employee benefits will relay employee communication to your company in the same way they would a national corporation. This could cause your employees to miss certain important internal communications regarding the amount of coverage they can receive for their families. Therefore, working with independent health insurance companies, and finding out about employee benefits from organizations may be the way to go.

No matter how large or small your business may be, holding an employee meeting to learn more about things like 401k, IRAs, Social Security, and health insurance is always a good method of corporate communication. Employees that may have joined the company in their 40s or 50s will most likely be especially concerned about retirement benefits, and those with children will have questions about health insurance. Being able to utilize hard-copy materials as a form of effective employee benefit communications during a face to face meeting may ease any doubts and answer any questions they may have about their benefits and compensation.

The importance of effective corporate communication is a huge part of your company’s success. Be sure that you are being clear and open any time you engage in employee communication and try to have some available at all times during regular business hours to answer any additional questions concerns.

We all know that business is all about people. The success and failure of every organization depends on the quality of people found in the organization. Sourcing for and recruiting the best hands in an organization is not just all it requires. For an organization to grow and stand out in its industry, the best set of people should be sourced, selected, recruited and retained.

Employee retention is of paramount importance and a critical issue in an organization. Retaining your best hands ensures customer satisfaction, improved sales, satisfied co-workers, effective and balanced relationship between staff and management, effective succession planning, general growth of the culture and ethics of the organization.

One very important adage says that if one does not value the importance of knowledge, then one should try ignorance. This goes a long way to explain the benefits of sourcing, recruiting and retaining the right staff in an organization. The cost of frequent employee turnover in an organization can be felt in the areas of the cost attached to selection, recruitment, orientation, induction, training and developing such staff. Failing to retain a key employee is very costly infarct more costly than recruiting a new one.

Employee retention is very important also because of its societal perception. When a firm starts loosing its staff especially the good ones, it does not say well about the health of the firm to the society. Employee retention is one of the primary measures of the health of your organization. If you are losing critical staff members, you can safely bet that other people in their departments will not be comfortable most especially when you are loosing such staff they are looking up to. Exit interviews with departing employees provide valuable information you can use to retain remaining staff, but most companies do not even care about conducting an exit interview when they have staff exit.

TIPS TO RETAIN YOUR EMPLOYEES:

Employ the best staff available in the Labour Market: The very first and important tip to retaining your staff is making sure that you go for the best staff the labour market is ready to offer. Most recruiters compromise this by employing their friends, brothers, sisters and relations. The result of this is that the norm, culture and ethics of the organization are always pushed aside.
Satisfy your employees: A satisfied employee knows exactly what is expected of him at all times. Creating unnecessary and unhealthy stress in a work in environment keeps people on edge and always questions their job security.
Authority and Responsibility lines should be clearly stated: An employee should be able to have a clear knowledge of his daily, weekly and monthly expectations as well as his line of reporting clearly stated. Both the supervisor and the supervised should feel valued at all times as employee turnover may result when any feels unvalued.
Avenue for Feedback: A good firm must provide an avenue for a total and complete feedback structure. The firm should be able to solicit ideas and provide avenue in which people are comfortable to say their minds. Employees should feel belonged to the firm, provide ideas, suggestions, citicise, and be heard. Any thing less than this will make the employee feel deprived and not belonging to the firm.
Develop their Talents and Skills: Training and development is very important in career Management. A well-trained staff will be motivated to add value to him self and his organization. New trends and technology is evolving now and then, and all firms should be able to update their staff with current information and technology at all times.
All staff should be treated with fairness and equity: Staff salary structure should be clearly defined, career path should be clearly established and staff should be rewarded accordingly with performance and not because the staff is related to the CEO or GM.
Recognition: When a staff achieves a great feat, he should be recognized and rewarded accordingly. Nothing motivates a staff like recognition for performance met.
DON’T threaten a staff with his job: Give a staff a target and encourage him to do his best. Do not keep on hammering in his ears that you will sack him if he does not perform. This may add to him not performing as he will become nervous and be on his toes to look for other opportunities outside instead of concentrating to do his job.

Your staff must be REWARDED, APPRECIATED & RECOGNISED. Thank you, well done, that’s a good one, cudos etc makes a staff feel rewarded and happy as well as being motivated to do more. Also monetary rewards, gifts and bonuses are tools to retain your good and performing staff. Where these are lacking when a staff is performing, makes the staff to look for where he will be appreciated for a job well done.

These tips for sure will help any organization to retain their good staff and reduce the cases of employee turnover.

The current economic downturn has changed the world dramatically. It’s a new ball game for every organization. Now, more than any time in the past 60+ years, current feedback from employees and customers is essential for knowing where we are, where we need to be, and for planning our organizations’ futures. Conducting effective surveys provides information and insight for making informed decisions, driving positive change and significantly increasing profit and organizational sustainability.

If your organization conducts surveys, or if you are thinking of conducting a survey, this article will help you achieve excellent results and avoid pitfalls often encountered while conducting surveys.

To receive a PDF version of the complete survey report by e-mail, including employee survey best practices, key survey findings, survey data and verbatim comments, please send an e-mail to hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom requesting the “Employee Survey Best Practices Report.”

Survey Best Practices – Increasing Your Survey Expertise

As a survey company we are often asked questions about survey practices: What is the best way to conduct surveys? How can we get the highest possible response rate? Should we use a survey company, or should we try to use a self-use online survey service? The questions we receive are many and varied.

While Quantisoft has extensive survey experience and expertise, we decided to conduct a survey to identify employee survey best practices at organizations we do not conduct surveys for. The findings of the survey validated our own survey experience and produced interesting and useful information and insight about employee surveys.

This article includes the key Lessons Learned and Actions for You to Consider from Quantisoft’s Survey About Employee Survey Practices. Please contact Howard Deutsch at hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom to receive the full Employee Survey Best Practices Report, including the survey findings, data and verbatim comments.

Lessons Learned

1. Types of Employee Surveys – Participating organizations are using a wide range of employee surveys to gather information and insight for making better decisions and making informed changes. Types of surveys they conduct include employee satisfaction/engagement, employee benefits opinion, employee turnover, sales force opinion, IT customer satisfaction, business risk assessment and other surveys. Information about types of employee, customer and specialty surveys is presented at http://www.quantisoft.com/Industries/SurveyTypes.htm.

2. Survey Frequency – The most common frequency for conducting surveys is annually.

3. Satisfaction with Survey Companies vs. Self-use Survey Services – Organizations that primarily use survey companies are significantly more satisfied with their survey process than organizations primarily using self-service online survey services. The reasons survey companies are providing greater satisfaction and value than self-service survey services include the expertise and experience provided, receiving survey reports quickly without the need to take time to generate graphs and other reports in-house, objective analysis of survey results, more focus on implementing changes, greater support and involvement from management and other factors.

4. Effectiveness of Survey Practices – Organizations primarily using survey companies rate the effectiveness of key survey practice significantly higher than organizations using self-service online survey services. The survey practices with the largest gaps in effectiveness ratings are receiving support from managers, producing timely useful reports, communicating survey findings, developing implementation plans, analyzing survey results and achieving results from surveys.

5. Importance of Survey Practices - Survey respondents identified the “most” important survey practices as keeping responses anonymous, conducting follow-up surveys, time taken to complete survey and analysis of survey data.

6. Survey Response Period and Rate – Responding organizations strive to achieve a high survey response rate. A 2-week survey response period is most popular. A third week typically generates a higher response rate. 60% of responding organizations typically have a survey response rate of 60% or greater.

7. Primary Survey Approach - Online/Web surveys are the most often-used approach. Organizations are learning ways to end the use of paper surveys, even for employees that do not use computers to perform their job. 70% of responding organizations use Online/Web surveys as their primary approach, 20% use paper surveys as their primary approach and 10% use Online/Web surveys supplemented with paper surveys as their primary approach.

8. Reasons for Conducting Employee Surveys – The top reasons for conducting employee surveys include identifying performance improvement opportunities, assessing employee satisfaction and engagement levels and trends, part of ongoing measurement process and identifying causes of employee turnover.

9. Surveys Achieving Their Objectives – Some organizations are achieving very strong results from surveys while others are falling short. Key factors for achieving survey objectives include management support for conducting surveys and implementing changes, using a survey company and executing well on all of the survey practices. Surveys generate significant quantitative and qualitative results when designed and executed well, followed up by effective analysis and implementation of changes identified by surveys.

10. Using Normative Benchmarking Data – Survey respondents prefer to benchmark their survey results with survey results from other organizations. However, they are not comfortable using benchmarking data unless they can be sure the data enables “apples-to-apples” comparisons. Similarity of organizations being bench marked, similarity of survey questions/wording, common time frame for when survey data was collected and other factors are important for making valid benchmarking comparisons.

11. Survey Best Practices – Knowing and consistently following best practices is very important for successfully conducting surveys and achieving results. Organizations that fail to follow best practices for all survey practices fail to achieve the full potential results from surveys.

Actions for You to Consider – Conducting Better Surveys

1. Share the full Employee Survey Best Practices Report with people in your organization who are responsible for conducting surveys, and with managers that can benefit from conducting surveys. Send your request for the full report to hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom.

2. Compare your organization’s approach for conducting surveys with the best practices, lessons learned and other information and insight included in the full report available from Quantisoft. Identify and implement changes your organization can make to achieve greater results from surveys.

3. Consider conducting surveys to gather information and insight for increasing your organization’s competitiveness and bottom line in this difficult economic environment. Beyond the usual employee satisfaction/engagement surveys, other types of surveys can enable your organization to identify ways to increase sales, identify and manage risks more effectively, gather feedback for reducing costs and increasing quality and customer service levels, enhance your organization’s “going green” profile, get more value from employee benefits dollars spent and much more.

4. The world has changed dramatically during the past year. The information and insight gathered from surveys conducted just a few months ago may no longer be valid. Update previous surveys now to gather current information and adjust action plans to reflect the “new reality”.

5. Make sure to focus your organization’s surveys on gathering actionable information that will positively impact employees, customers, the environment and your bottom line.

Information and tips that will help you to achieve results from surveys are presented at http://www.quantisoft.com.

The term culture by and large denotes the ideas, customs, and art of a particular society. While referring to work culture or organization culture one would particularly mean the customs, patterns, arts and beliefs followed in various organizations. Edgar Schein, one of the most prominent theorists of organizational culture, gave the following definition: The culture of a group can now be defined as a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

Employee satisfaction on the other hand is a measure of how happy workers are with their job and working environment. Keeping morale high among workers can be of tremendous benefit to any company as quite rightly pointed out Jack Welch in his statement Employee satisfaction gets you productivity, quality, pride, and creativity.

In today’s world of globalization organizations stress immensely to follow a culture which encourages open channels of communication, a flat hierarchy, informal environment, teamwork, and respect to new ideas and thoughts.

The following aspects can broadly define the likely preferred work culture in today’s organizations which contribute to a satisfied workforce:

1.Work timings: Flexible work timings have gained immense popularity amongst today’s organizations. Organizations have started giving their employees the leverage of entering the office premises at anytime of their convenience and completing their designated tasks, though a minimum hours have to be spent in the workplace

2. Work from Home: Another concept which is gaining importance, more amongst female workers, is the concept of work from home. Organizations are largely investing in equipments with the aid of which employees will have the benefit to stay at home and at the same time stay connected to the office network

3.Business Attire: As opposed to formal business attire for day to day work, organizations have now remodeled their policy on daily dress code to the widely preferred business casuals which also includes denim on one day of work. A few organizations also have a policy of Friday dressing where only casuals can be worn by their employees

4. Flat Hierarchy: The preferred organization structure is a flat organization structure with few levels of hierarchy which enables fast decision making and easy accessibility to top management. People who stay closer to customers know better the market needs and can respond faster to rapidly changing customer requirements and such changes can be easily highlighted and brought to the notice of the top management in a flat hierarchy. Another emerging trend in today’s organization are meetings with supervisors supervisor which helps in smooth interaction within different levels of management which is very effective within a flat hierarchy

5.Decentralization: This is the process of dispersing decision-making governance to the employee at the lowest level of the hierarchy and giving them the right to exercise a few decisions all by themselves which acts as a great time saving and cost cutting mechanism

6.  Employee Empowerment: Organizations are largely investing in employee empowerment. The increasing use of Employee Self service Systems which allow employees to maintain their own personal data is the biggest example. This also helps to reduce unnecessary paper work and also aims at data accuracy

7. Innovation: As George S Patton says “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” The increasing demand of today’s workforce is acknowledgment and implementation of their ideas and thus organizations have now started investing in employee innovation where young and fresh ideas are being recognized as best practices

8.Rewards & Recognition: With the increase in stress levels, with long working hours how does an organization aim to create contributing and motivated employees, how do organizations maintain the high employee morale and the quality of life are some of the key concerns of today’s organizations and one of the many answers to these question is an effective reward and recognition system. Apart from the performance appraisal system organizations today are investing a lot in reward and recognition programs where employees are rewarded as Star employees and key achievers, long Service awards are announced for employees who work with the organization for a long tenure, Employee referral programs motivates an employee to bring their friends to work with them

9. Employee Recreation: Employee recreation programs have been shown to reduce absenteeism, increase performance and productivity, reduce stress levels, and increase job satisfaction. The new term coined to define employee recreation is associate engagement. A few examples of employee recreational activities are office outings, invitation to employees family to come and visit employees workplace, annual sports event, team outings, decoration of employee workspace , organizing music clubs, dance clubs, drama clubs, arranging training for special areas of interest of the employees

10. Employee Benefits: Benefits are forms of value, other than payment, that are provided to the employee in return for their contribution to the organization. Employee benefits typically refers to retirement plans, health life insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, vacation, employee stock ownership plans, membership to clubs, special offers and discounts on premium products and outlets, sponsorship for education of employees children, attractive schemes from financial institutions on purchase of assets, subsidized food in canteen

To sum up culture is the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate behavior and in today’s world organizations are going through a constant change in order to maintain the best possible culture which sets an example and pave the way for enhanced employee satisfaction.