All Opinion articles – Page 52
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OpinionNick Lawry: What does 2018 hold for employee benefits?
Pensions will continue to be a hot topic as auto-enrolment fully bites. So how will employers tackle the inherent conflict of trying to engage employees to save for retirement to prevent a high opt-out rate as auto-escalation kicks in, while trying to manage a benefits budget that will not automatically ...
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OpinionRosemary Lemon: What does 2018 hold for employee benefits?
Life is getting hard and it looks like getting tougher in 2018 as we struggle with the potential impact of Brexit, increasing cost of living and the ever expensive property market. Recent press coverage has highlighted the escalating use of food banks and the fact that, as Christmas approaches, some ...
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OpinionAnt Donaldson: What does 2018 hold for employee benefits?
Every year seems to bring new challenges, so what should we be looking out for in 2018?As always, changing regulations are a key theme. Despite a quiet Budget, the headline change is the increase in minimum pensions auto-enrolment contributions to 5% from April, including 3% from employees, with a further ...
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OpinionSumita Ketkar: What can employers learn from gender pay gap reporting?
It is hardly a revelation that employers are not enthusiastic about announcing their gender pay gap figures, even as the April 2018 deadline approaches. As of the first week of November 2017, only 204 of 9,000 organisations based in the UK had announced their figures, and only a small minority ...
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OpinionTerry Woolmer: Private medical insurance benefits both employers and employees
EEF’s annual sickness absence surveys have consistently shown that employers believe some form of incentive to provide private medical insurance (PMI) for their employees would be beneficial. In EEF's Employee health: Making industrial strategy work for Britain – Health, work, wellbeing and sickness absence survey 2017, published in August 2016, ...
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OpinionRaman Sankaran: Is it time for eldercare to get the same recognition as childcare?
Growing old is as natural as being young. Yet, while most businesses have policies to support their employees’ childcare arrangements, eldercare is ambiguous or completely overlooked.Two-thirds of British adults believe organisations should redress this imbalance, giving eldercare the same support as childcare receives, according to the Simplyhealth/YouGov Everyday health tracker ...
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OpinionPaul Quain: The chance to learn from equal pay experimentation in the US and UK
Equal pay laws have been around for decades, yet the gender wage gap persists. According to the US Census Bureau's Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015 report, published in September 2016, in the United States (US), women earn approximately 80% of the pay received by their male counterparts. ...
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OpinionNigel Peaple: Employers need to support employees with pension choices
Automatic-enrolment has been extremely successful and there are now 13.5 million people who are active members of a pension scheme, according to the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) Occupational pension scheme survey, published in September 2017. This means that employers are making a substantial contribution to many workers' retirement aspirations. ...
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OpinionJohn Williams: Line managers can contribute to agile working conditions
People are heavily influenced by their working environment. Rigid structures and siloed departments with complex hierarchies are becoming something of the past; employees now naturally want to work in flexible, friendly and, dare we say it, fun organisations. But is this the reality in the UK workplace? And if not, ...
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OpinionNigel Shepherd: Pensions are an important consideration in divorce proceedings
We all know that divorce is sadly part of modern life. Although the overall trend recently has been a reduction since a high in 2003-2004, just over 40% of marriages still break down, according to the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) 2016 figures. But what are the financial consequences of ...
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OpinionRuth Christy: Avoiding the pitfalls of the office Christmas party
The Christmas party season is approaching and, for employers, it could open a Pandora’s Box of complications if not carefully managed.The office Christmas party presents two specific challenges: the party is normally off site and the combination of high spirits and alcohol. This unique work-related scenario requires some forward planning ...
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OpinionNatalie Riddick: Explore Learning engages millennials using organisational culture, competitive reward and financial support
While Explore Learning has rapidly grown in size over the last 15 years, we have worked really hard to ensure that we still have the feel of a smaller, entrepreneurial and incredibly ambitious organisation. So much of that is captured in our culture. We host two events every year that ...
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OpinionKatharine Moxham: Group risk providers go above and beyond claim payments
We all expect insurance policies to pay out when we need them and group income protection is no exception, but that is not all it does.Group risk benefits are mostly associated with catastrophic life events, such as illness, accidents, disability and death, but they can, and do, provide everyday help ...
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OpinionEmma Davidson: Corporate social responsibility initiatives can have wider organisational impacts
In the past, corporate social responsibility (CSR) was considered a back-office activity which did not impact employees’ on a day-to-day basis. However research from the Harvard Business Review, published in 2016, indicates that CSR is becoming increasingly important for building and maintaining a loyal and engaged workforce.So how can employers ...
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OpinionJennifer Millins: A dry run of gender pay gap metrics can help flag up vulnerabilities
Larger employers have until 4 April 2018 to disclose their gender pay gaps.Many businesses are still gathering data. Ascertaining which staff are in-scope, and calculating weekly working hours and hourly rates of pay can be challenging, particularly when long-term absences and atypical working arrangements arise. Bonuses, share plans and flexible ...
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OpinionMark Swain: Tips for engaging younger workers with their health and wellbeing
Early-career professionals seem to have a growing mistrust of the 'big bad corporate', and anything that commits them to something over the long term. Maybe that’s symptomatic of younger people making only short-term commitments, and having many more jobs and projects over their working lifetime. And this transience is compounded ...
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OpinionSally Wilson: Simple nudges can encourage employees to look after their own health and wellbeing
There are several relatively simple steps employers can take to address wellbeing at work with the potential to reduce claims related to ill health.For musculoskeletal (MSK) health, getting the basics right is essential and display screen equipment (DSE) assessment is an important example of this. Flexible working requires a re-think ...
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OpinionLovewell's logic: Should employers award extra holiday to non smokers?
Last week, Japanese firm Piala hit the headlines with the news that it has introduced up to six additional days paid holiday per year for the non smokers in its workforce to counterbalance the smoking breaks taken by their colleagues. The company is based on the 29th floor of an ...
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OpinionSian McKinley: Enhancing shared parental pay could be the answer to levelling the childcare playing field
The low take-up of shared parental leave is due in large part to fathers not being able to afford to take it at statutory rates. The facts of Ali v Capita Customer Management are unfortunately entirely consistent with these findings.Mr Ali sought to take shared parental leave to care for ...
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OpinionDomonique McRae: Should employers accept joint liability for labour abuse within supply chains?
In July 2017, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published Good work: the Taylor review of modern working practices, an independent review of working practices. This report made a number of recommendations to attempt to address some of the issues currently facing the UK labour market.One of ...