Many employees need help with open enrollment. This is particularly true among younger workers, who typically have less experience selecting benefits than older generations that have been in the workforce longer. A study by insurance and employee benefits provider MetLife found that 26% of Generation Z (Gen Z) employees are insecure about making benefits decisions.

Companies today face a growing need to reimagine traditional workplace practices amid labor shortages and evolving employment regulations. As the workforce landscape evolves and expectations shift, organizations are discovering that maintaining a competitive edge goes beyond the usual perks and benefits.

Employees who feel disregarded by their organization are more likely to get frustrated, feel burnt out and quit. Forbes listed being unheard by supervisors and feeling “overlooked or ignored” as two of the top ten reasons employees leave their jobs. This can devastate employee retention rates, increasing hiring costs and making it challenging for employers to keep talented workers.

Deciding how many HR professionals an organization needs to operate effectively is a hotly debated topic. Some organizations rely on metrics to guide them in making this decision. One of the most common metrics organizations use when deciding whether to hire HR professionals is the HR-to-employee ratio. When properly analyzed, this ratio can aid employers in meeting their HR needs and benchmarking their organizations against others.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is a federal law providing eligible employees of covered employers with unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons. In general, eligible employees may take up to 12 weeks of leave each year for FMLA-qualifying reasons, including for treatment of a serious health condition.

More businesses are exploring low- and no-code development, which enables employees outside of IT to design and develop software solutions to problems specific to their function. A low-code development platform requires users to have little or no coding experience, increasing accessibility and feasibility for many functions and teams, including HR professionals. Similarly, no-code platforms require no coding experience.

Despite an employer’s best efforts to ensure a successful open enrollment, it’s likely that some employees will still miss the enrollment deadline or mistakenly select the wrong benefits. Employees in these situations may ask their employer to allow them to correct their mistakes.

A recession is a prolonged and pervasive reduction in economic activity. Generally speaking, multiple successive quarters of negative growth in gross domestic product—a monetary calculation of the market value of goods and services generated and sold during a set time period within a given country—constitute a recession.

Many Americans pay attention to prices and shop around when buying gas, groceries or big-ticket items like automobiles, but most don’t do the same for their health care. A survey from AKASA, a health care artificial intelligence company, revealed that nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans have never tried to find the price of a health care service.

Health insurance may be one of the most critical annual purchases since it impacts your physical, mental and financial wellness. Unfortunately, selecting a health insurance plan can feel overwhelming. With so many options, it can also be easy to make a mistake when selecting coverage.

Identifying and retaining key employees is especially important in light of ongoing attraction and retention difficulties many employers have been facing. According to Zywave’s 2022 Attraction and Retention Survey, more than 75% of employers consider attraction and retention to be among their top five business challenges.

Current health care costs in the United States are high and rising. For many individuals, their health care costs outpace their wages. Since 2010, medical trend has grown by 73%, according to the Council for Affordable Health Coverage (CAHC). This is approximately four times faster than the average American’s wage and five times quicker than the consumer price index.

Pay transparency is when an employer openly communicates pay-related information through established practices to current or prospective employees. Employers can provide this information through various channels, such as online job sites, job postings or during an interview. As a result of changing labor markets, more and more employees are demanding pay transparency.

Each year, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducts a survey to examine employer-sponsored health benefits trends. This document summarizes the main points of the 2022 Employer Health Benefits Survey.

“Quiet quitting” continues to be an emerging trend where workers only do what their job description entails without going above and beyond. Or, this could mean only doing work directly assigned to them by a manager, while not looking for other ways to contribute to a team.

On Nov. 16, 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Speak Out Act, prohibiting courts from enforcing nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses between employers and their employees and independent contractors that were in place before sexual harassment and assault disputes. The U.S. Senate signed the bill on Sept. 29, 2022.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released its October Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary. The month’s reported number of job openings decreased by 353,000 to 10.3 million as the Federal Reserve (Fed) increased interest rates in an effort to cool the labor market. October’s number of job openings is down 760,000 compared with a year ago, resulting in 1.7 job openings for each unemployed worker.

Employees are an organization’s first line of defense against cybercriminals. For this reason, they are also commonly targeted. In fact, the vast majority (88%) of data breaches are caused by employee mistakes, according to Stanford University. Unfortunately for organizations, a single mistake can result in costly losses, reputational damage and lost or stolen data.

Open enrollment season—the annual period when you enroll in a health insurance plan—is now in full swing. For employer-sponsored plans, you should expect your employer to provide information about open enrollment during this time. There are several things you may want to consider when selecting a health insurance plan and this article covers some common considerations.

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) took effect in 1989 to protect workers, their families and communities by ensuring workers receive advance notice about qualified plant closings and mass layoffs. With sufficient notice, workers can better plan for and adjust to a loss of employment, and communities are better able to cope with large-scale job loss.