Retention

More US Employers Embrace Fertility Benefits as a Talent Attractor
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Feb 8, 2019 - 11:17am
More US Employers Embrace Fertility Benefits as a Talent Attractor
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In today’s tight labor market, US employers are having to work harder to attract and retain talent, not just by offering more pay and benefits, but also by targeting their employee value proposition to fit the needs of their candidates and current employees. As millennials take on the burden of caring for their aging parents while starting families of their own, and as progressive organizations strive to make sure motherhood doesn’t derail the career of their women employees, many of the latest benefit trends are family-focused: paid parental leave, flexibility for working parents, returnship programs for parents returning from career breaks, and so forth.

Another increasingly popular family benefit is health insurance coverage for fertility treatments, to help employees who want to start families but struggle with infertility. In vitro fertilization, the most effective of these treatments, is increasingly common as women start families later, but is often prohibitively expensive, costing over $12,000 for just one round, whereas several rounds are sometimes required to result in a successful pregnancy.

Despite the cost, we’ve seen several large employers add fertility benefits to their rewards packages in the past year, including Cisco, Estée Lauder, and MassMutual. In a recent feature at the New York Times, Vanessa Grigoriadis takes a look at what’s driving this trend, pointing to a recent Mercer study that found the percentage of large employers (of 20,000 employees or more) had increased from 37 percent to 44 percent from 2017 to 2018:

These days, I.V.F. coverage is “escaping” the sectors that have traditionally offered it, meaning tech, banking and media, said Jake Anderson, a former partner at Sequoia Capital and a founder of Fertility IQ, a website that assesses doctors, procedures and clinics. General Mills, Chobani, the Cooper Companies and Designer Shoe Warehouse have either introduced coverage or greatly increased dollar amounts for 2019. Procter & Gamble Company offered only $5,000 in fertility benefits until this year, when it increased the benefit to $40,000.

Many organizations are falling short, however, when it comes to communicating this benefit to employees and job seekers, Grigoriadis points out:

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Diversity & Inclusion • News • Rewards //  • • • • • • • • •

Are American Millennials Rich or Poor? Either Way, They Want Help Getting Out of Debt
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Dec 13, 2018 - 4:58pm
Are American Millennials Rich or Poor? Either Way, They Want Help Getting Out of Debt
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Millennials now make up the largest age cohort in the US workforce, so employers have an interest in understanding the needs, preferences, and concerns of this generation in order to effectively attract, retain, and develop millennial talent. A common belief about millennials is that their consumption patterns and lifestyle choices are markedly different from those of previous generations: living with their parents longer, getting married later or not at all, and buying homes and automobiles at lower rates. A stereotypical view that has thus emerged of millennials is that they are simply choosing not to do the things their older peers expected them to do in their early careers. The growing consensus among observers of the economic data, however, is that the main reason millennials aren’t behaving like their baby boomer and gen-X predecessors is that they are not as well-off as these generations were at the same point in their lives, thanks in large part to having come into the workforce during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

In the past few weeks, two studies have come out that complicate both of these narratives about millennials, but conflict in how they depict this generation’s financial health. The first is a working paper by Federal Reserve Board economists Christopher Kurz, Geng Li, and Daniel J. Vine, titled “Are Millennials Different?” Yes and no, the economists conclude:

Relative to members of earlier generations, millennials are more racially diverse, more educated, and more likely to have deferred marriage; these comparisons are continuations of longer-run trends in the population. Millennials are less well off than members of earlier generations when they were young, with lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth. For debt, millennials hold levels similar to those of Generation X and more than those of the baby boomers. Conditional on their age and other factors, millennials do not appear to have preferences for consumption that differ significantly from those of earlier generations. (Emphasis ours.)

In other words, the paper debunks the idea that millennials are buying fewer houses and new cars because they want to live lower-consumption lifestyles, and instead supports the view that they just haven’t accumulated the wealth to afford these big purchases. On the other hand, economist Alison Schrager argues at Quartz that the Fed data can also be read a different way, and that millennials “are in fine shape, maybe even richer than previous generations, but they have just chosen to invest in different assets”—i.e., higher education:

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Recruiting • Rewards //  • • • • • • • •

ReimagineHR: Applying New Concepts in Social Science to D&I
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Nov 5, 2018 - 4:33pm
ReimagineHR: Applying New Concepts in Social Science to D&I
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Being both a “social issue” and a business concern, diversity and inclusion is one area where events in the corporate world can have a significant impact on society writ large: For example, just look at how businesses in the US have shaped the public conversation around issues like immigration, LGBT inclusion, and freedom of speech in the past two years. This dynamic works both ways, however, and changing conventions of how diversity is discussed in the academic and media environments can push organizations to rethink how they implement D&I on the ground. Recently, several new terms have entered this discourse that present new challenges (and opportunities) for D&I leaders to bring new dimensions to their work.

At Gartner’s ReimagineHR conference in Orlando last week, Gartner VP, Team Manager Lauren Romansky gave a presentation on three of these emerging concepts from psychology and sociology, and how D&I can leverage them as more than just buzzwords, to create value in their organizations. The terms are:

  • Intersectionality: A holistic picture of identity, which asserts that various dimensions of diversity (such as sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, gender, disability, or socioeconomic status) are inseparable when considering individual experiences. For example, whereas women and black Americans both experience specific forms of discrimination and adversity, the intersection of these identities means black women in particular have a discrete experience that is more than the sum of its parts.
  • Psychological safety: A shared belief that a team feels comfortable taking interpersonal risks. This means that team members are able to bring their authentic selves to work and communicate openly and transparently without fear of negative professional consequences. Psychological safety (a group dynamic) is different from trust (an individual dynamic), but can help build trust between team members.
  • Belonging: A sense of acceptance and community within a given group. Over the past several decades, D&I has evolved from making sure historically disadvantaged groups are represented in the workplace (diversity) to making sure they are invited to participate (inclusion). Belonging can be thought of as the next step in that evolution, toward making sure these employees feel like full members of their workplace communities.

Bringing these ideas into D&I can help add value in various ways.

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Diversity & Inclusion //  • • • • • • •

For Retailers, Attracting Holiday Staff Means More than Just Raising Pay
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Oct 24, 2018 - 4:01pm
For Retailers, Attracting Holiday Staff Means More than Just Raising Pay
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Facing one of the tightest labor markets in living memory, US retailers and other companies staffing up for the holiday season have had to get creative about finding and attracting the extra workers they need for the seasonal rush. Some retail chains started hiring for the winter holidays all the way back in the early summer, raised entry-level wages for store employees, and offered a variety of bonuses and perks like store discounts.

The retail sector was already feeling pressure to bump up pay, the Star-Tribune reported this week, citing a survey by the hiring platform Snag that found retailers expected wages to rise by 54 percent this year. That’s partly a product of a labor shortage, but also reflects the growth of online shopping:

As more shoppers order online and opt to have items shipped to the store or their front door, retailers’ backroom operations are changing. Mass merchants still need cashiers, salespeople and shelf stockers. But they need more people to package orders for store pickup and to work in warehouses and distribution centers, which increasingly requires more technology skills.

Target is doubling the number of staff it needs to handle digital orders. Macy’s, which is hiring about the same number as last year, will shift its mix and add 5,500 more people for its fulfillment centers. Best Buy says it, too, will bulk up on workers to package up online orders.

Labor market competition, the need to attract and retain more skilled employees, and “HR-as-PR” considerations are all coming to bear on retailers’ decisions to raise pay for their hourly employees. They are also courting hires with new benefits, including intangible benefits like flexibility, Steve Bates notes at SHRM:

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News • Recruiting • Rewards //  • • • • • • •

How to Use Diversity and Inclusion to Engage Hourly Employees
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Sep 13, 2018 - 4:50pm
How to Use Diversity and Inclusion to Engage Hourly Employees
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Hourly employees make up over 50 percent of the total US employee population and a critical segment of the workforce at many organizations. While employee engagement efforts typically focus primarily on salaried employees who are perceived as having more of a long-term commitment to the organization, hourly employee engagement and loyalty are growing concerns for HR leaders in today’s tight labor markets. According to recent Gartner research, hourly workers are more engaged in their jobs when they are satisfied with their employer’s diversity and inclusion efforts.

In the past year, we’ve seen many large companies launch new initiatives to better engage and retain their hourly employees, whether through education benefits or opportunities to work with local nonprofit organizations. HR leaders have also seen improvement of hourly employee engagement when these employees have positive perceptions of their organization’s D&I activities, our research finds. In fact, when hourly employees are satisfied with D&I, they exhibit almost twice the discretionary effort and almost three times the intent to stay compared to those who are not satisfied. However, only about half of hourly employees are currently involved with D&I efforts and HR leaders are uncertain how to use D&I to engage this population.

Our D&I research team has uncovered three ways HR leaders can leverage hourly employee engagement in D&I to make a positive impact on the organization:

Integrate D&I in Current Processes

HR leaders should integrate D&I efforts into pre-existing engagement initiatives, such as team meetings, to ensure that cultural values and behaviors are articulated and implemented consistently throughout the organization. This approach addresses a key challenge hourly employees face when connecting to D&I at their organizations: They do not feel included on their teams. By building hourly employee inclusion into existing processes, organizations can improve team performance without creating additional structures for HR to manage.

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ReimagineHR: How Digital Recruiting Has Changed the Candidate Journey
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Sep 5, 2018 - 10:27pm
ReimagineHR: How Digital Recruiting Has Changed the Candidate Journey
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“Writing a check,” Warren Buffett famously quipped, “separates a commitment from a conversation.” This used to be true of submitting a job application as well, but not in today’s increasingly competitive, digitally enhanced recruiting environment, Gartner Principal Executive Advisor Dion Love explained at Gartner’s ReimagineHR summit in London on Wednesday. The path most candidates take through the recruiting process has fundamentally changed, which means organizations must also change their approach to recruiting in order to remain competitive.

Prior to the digital era, the typical candidate’s journey looked something like this: They researched companies to find out whether they wanted to work there, narrowed down their choices to a shortlist of preferred employers, applied for jobs, and finally spoke with recruiters. This candidate usually only made it to the interview stage with organizations they had already researched and were certainly interested in joining. Recruiters could assume that a candidate who sent in a résumé was committed to seeing the process through to the end.

Yet whereas the job application used to come toward the end of the candidate journey, it now often comes at the very beginning. Here’s what the journey normally looks like now: A candidate casually applies to a number of jobs they may or may not want, speaks with recruiters, then researches the employers that are interested in hiring them and narrows their choices down to one.

This shift in candidate behavior creates a whole new set of challenges for recruiters.

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Recruiting //  • • • • • •

When Weighing the Cost of Paternity Leave, Don’t Neglect Its Benefits
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Aug 2, 2018 - 5:01pm
When Weighing the Cost of Paternity Leave, Don’t Neglect Its Benefits
Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

In an opinion piece published last weekend, Bloomberg columnist Anjani Trivedi made the economic case for paternity leave, arguing that organizations too often overestimate the costs and neglect the financial upsides of offering parental leave to both mothers and fathers. “The real question,” she points out, “is what the cost would be of replacing that employee,” and paid leave is usually cheaper, Professor Jody Heymann of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health and WORLD Policy Analysis Center, tells Trivedi. Considering that parental leave and other family benefits can have a major impact on employee retention, and that the costs of replacing an employee can rise to as much as twice their annual salary, universal parental leave policies may well save more than they cost.

The growing number of employers offering gender-neutral parental leave benefits in recent years reflects the fact that employees, whose opinions count more than ever in the tight labor markets of the US and other advanced economies today, are more sensitive to the availability of paternity leave: Our latest benefits perceptions research at CEB, now Gartner, finds that globally, an additional two weeks of paternity leave improves employee perceptions of rewards to a greater degree than the same amount of additional maternity leave.

In the US, which unlike most countries does not legally mandate paid maternity leave, employees are still more responsive to changes in leave for mothers, but even there, Millennial men who are now starting families are more interested than their fathers were in being actively involved in raising their children. However, many of these men don’t have access to paid parental leave or feel pressured by their peers, their managers, or their own financial concerns not to take advantage of this benefit even when they are entitled to it. The absence of family-friendly benefits like parental leave and flexible work arrangements already drives many working mothers out of the full-time workforce; if fathers do the same, the case for such policies becomes even stronger than it already is.

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