Consumer-Driven Health Plans: Employer Practices and Future Outlook
By Mary Helen McSweeney-Feld, Ph.D., CBP, CEBS, Hagan School of Business, Iona College and Dennis J. Nirtaut, CCP, CBP
As employers face rising health-care costs, many organizations adopted consumer-driven health plan (CDHP) options to encourage employees to become better health-care consumers, and to control expenses within benefit plans. This paper reviews findings from previous CDHP research and data from recent surveys of nationally representative firms. The surveys focused on CDHP plan design and implementation issues, highlighting trends in CDHP options and their effectiveness in controlling health-benefit costs. Best practices for effective CDHP plan design and management by employers are also examined in light of recent national health-care reform initiatives.
Antitrust Laws and the Exchange of Employee Compensation Information
By Frank Giancola
HR professionals can find themselves subject to federal and state antitrust laws when determining employee wages and benefits. The most common practice that receives legal scrutiny is participation in wage and benefit surveys that are used by businesses to establish compensation levels to compete for the services of employees. This article summarizes the major cases that have presented antitrust problems for HR professionals, and it provides current guidance from the courts, regulators and several law firms.
The Talent Prize: A Strategic Outcome of Corporate Transactions
By Mary Cianni, Towers Watson and Sandra O’Neal
Corporate transactions afford an opportunity to strengthen current and future workforces. The thoughtful acquirer examines the talent that a deal affords. Good talent-management practices and processes can ensure value creation and help to achieve the deal’s goals. With talent shortages at hand around the globe, the successful organization of this century will be the one with a workforce-deployment strategy that includes securing, developing and rewarding top talent. |
Reconfiguration Pay: Adjusting Salary Rates to Reflect Layoff-Induced Job Content Changes
By Theodore E. Weinberger, Administaff
In the wake of a recession, company layoffs are often followed by the redistribution of some job content from the departed to retained employees. Unless this expansion in job content, or work reconfiguration, is then matched with commensurate salary increases, these retained employees (“survivors”) are likely to perceive temporal inequities — unfavorable comparisons in the ratio of salary rate to job content pre-layoff to post-layoff between themselves and co-workers. This article describes an approach for conducting a pay reconfiguration study to determine whether, and how much, to adjust employee salary rates to restore temporal equity given layoff-induced job content changes.
The Mixed Value of Using Lump Sums in Lieu of Putting Merit Pay into Base Pay
By Andrew L. Klein, Ph.D., Alisa McMillan, J.D., and George Reiter, CCP, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC)
A lump sum is a one-time payment of money used as a merit-based reward. This approach offers significant financial advantages to the employer because the lump sum does not increase the base salary, which can result in an absolute cost savings year over year. However, administering a lump-sum merit program is complex. This paper presents two approaches to indexing lump-sum merit pay to the market.
Containing Health-Care Costs in Asia Pacific During the Downturn
By Rosaline Chow Koo, Mercer
Despite the current economic turmoil in Asia and the short-term pressure on cost containment, any company wanting to enhance its benefits should consider the longer-term strategic implications. Sustainable savings and the maintenance of a strong workforce call for a combination of short-, medium- and long-term approaches to health benefit cost containment. By adopting a combination of these approaches, and applying such features as flexible benefits, organizations can thrive and not merely survive the current economic downturn in the region.
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