Engaging the 3 million registered nurses who comprise one of the largest and most important segments of the U.S. workforce is a top task for hospitals and essential to developing and maintaining positive, patient-friendly work environments and retaining talented staff. Linking employee engagement to patient experience outcomes is quickly becoming a health care best practice as hospitals strive to meet industry standards and mitigate a potential nursing shortage over the next several years. 

Insurers often recommend actions their members can take to improve their health and prevent costly, stressful diseases. They also may want to consider giving out some unusual advice: Members should get a pet. Cats and dogs provide so many benefits for their owners including companionship, reduced stress and increased exercise. Now there's tangible evidence proving pet ownership helps improve physical and mental health.

While increasing base pay for nurses is an obvious strategy that can help staff retention in hospitals and health systems, it often is an expense these provider organizations cannot afford. Towers Watson, through research, has found three other reward options that nurses value just as much as a pay increase but that cost the organization a lot less.

The days of employer-paid benefits are disappearing faster than a snow cone in July — especially when you consider that most companies are not helping to offset the costs for much more than major medical and physician care for their workers. And the sticker shock for premium increases has just barely begun. Just wait until 2015! However, in spite of increased health care costs, voluntary benefits are still popular even if employees are left to pick up the tab.

When it comes to retirement income planning for most clients, less is not more, and the contribution limits placed on traditional tax-preferred retirement vehicles have many of these clients searching for creative ways to ensure a comfortable retirement income level. Enter the health savings account, which, though traditionally intended to function as a savings account earmarked for medical expenses, can actually function as a powerful retirement income planning vehicle for clients looking to supplement their retirement savings.

Benefits pros know a strong 401k plan can be a huge factor in attracting and retaining top talent. But how can employers tell just how good their plan really is? One way is to make sure your plan has all of the following features.

As you’ve probably noticed, more employees are relying on their employers to help them navigate the financial jungle and better save for retirement. The challenge: coming up with advice to pass along to workers that won’t take your company from concerned educator to full-blown fiduciary. Steal these tips and pass them along to your workforce — either via email, intranet or good old-fashioned print and paper.

The cost of providing employee health care benefits has stabilized around the globe, although a new round of increases may be on the horizon for employers, according to a survey by Towers Watson. The survey also found that health promotion and wellness programs are becoming more widespread in all regions as employers look to supplement traditional cost-management tactics to contain rising costs.

A recent Fidelity study of more than 1,000 adults ages 55-70 found that pre-retirees planned to retire at an average age of 65. Fidelity’s 2014 Retiree Health Care Cost Estimate showed that even those who retire at that age can expect to incur $220,000 in medical costs during their retirement years. In light of this daunting prospect, Fidelity urges people to consider tax-advantaged health care savings opportunities outside of a 401(k) or IRA.

Now in its sixth year, National Employee Wellness Month helps business leaders learn how companies successfully engage employees in healthy lifestyles. It showcases how companies can support employees by creating healthy cultures, improving their health and well-being while lowering health care costs and driving engagement. This year’s proud supporters of the campaign include some of the world’s largest employers. All proud supporters of National Employee Wellness Month have demonstrated a commitment to improving their employees’ lives by taking an active role in helping to create a healthy, engaged workforce.

Another psychological victory for the lords of productivity: More than four in ten workers check in with work while on vacation, and one-quarter of employees feel guilty if they actually take all their vacation days. So says an employee engagement study from Randstad, an HR services provider that surveyed 2,257 adults about their vacation habits. When the data was extracted by generation, the study reinforced previous research that shows Millennials are the most inclined to stay connected pretty much around the clock, around the calendar.  

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is trying to fine-tune — once again — the rules around wellness program incentives. The latest tinkering popped up on an agenda for upcoming actions released by the EEOC. The agenda, reported HRMorning, included word of a new rule to dig deeper into incentives to root out discrimination there and another to examine health assessments tied to wellness plans for any evidence of violations of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

A recent survey of work-life flexibility confirms teleworking is a vital business strategy, not just a feel-good program that accommodates only part of the workforce.  Almost one-third (31 percent) of U.S. workers do most of their work from a remote location, according to a study by Flex+Strategy Group/Work+Life Fit. And those remote workers represent a cross-section of the workforce, breaking stereotypes that the typical teleworker is a woman with child-care responsibilities or a tech-savvy Generation Yer.

In an era of steep health care challenges, physicians are often asked to lead their organizations through myriad unprecedented changes. And although leadership and executive positions are often outside doctors' traditional roles, research suggests that physician leadership is key to helping organizations thrive.

At a ThirdPath Institute conference a few weeks ago, a great discussion arose around the fact that workloads tend to ebb and flow and it’s important to know how to alternate between periods of peak effort and recovery. Before long, someone noted the analogy to high performance in sports and used a phrase that piqued my curiosity: 'corporate athlete.' I loved the term so much I jotted it down thinking I might make something of it in my writing and consulting. Then I Googled it. Oops. Apparently, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have already made quite a lot of the term 'corporate athlete' having coined it way back in a 2001 HBR article and explored it in a series of best-selling books about engagement, energy and business success. So much for my plan to unleash it on the world. But I was all the more glad to find so much work already done on corporate athleticism because it has a lot to offer my field: the challenges faced by working parents.

What does it take to get employees to participate in a company-sponsored wellness program? Three critical elements can make it happen: strong communications with the workforce about wellness, powerful incentives up front and employee rewards on the back end.

Before investing millions of dollars, National Football League teams conduct multiple tests to determine whether promising young players can perform up to expectations. Everyday employers nowadays also are increasingly relying on sophisticated physical assessment tools that can improve hiring practices. "Companies have had drug, alcohol and other types of screenings but never a physical aptitude screening," said Jim Lewis, director of business development for Key Functional Assessments in Carlsbad, Calif. "In the past, employers have determined the health of new hires but not their capacity for doing the job. There are major hard and soft costs if you hire someone who can’t do the job or if they get disillusioned and leave."

Employers continue to embrace wellness programs, and employees keep saying they appreciate them and will use them. But a new study suggests that many employers that could be realizing even more value from their wellness plans aren’t. Virgin Pulse surveyed 341 employers and nearly 4,000 employees about attitudes and actions around wellness programs. The survey results supported the trend toward the offering of more wellness programs with more bells and whistles, and found a high level of employee participation in the programs. But when employers were asked whether they were going to beef up their incentives as permitted under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more than four in ten said they had no plans to.

A new study of employee benefits trends finds that companies are moving rapidly toward providing outcome-based incentives for workers who take part in wellness programs. The fifth-annual benchmarking study by bswift looked at three areas of benefits: defined contribution, wellness programs and incentives and employee self-service and automation.