All Opinion articles – Page 53
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OpinionMichael Hanley: Being a living wage employer reaps business benefits
The gap between the rich and poor is a national disgrace. Poverty wages and zero hours contracts inflict untold hardship on millions of people, when they need help and support. At Wilson Solicitors, we are concerned by the economic injustice that pervades our society. This is why we threw our ...
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OpinionChris Curry: Employers can take a mixed approach to helping employees save for retirement
Automatic-enrolment has changed the landscape for workplace pensions in the UK, so now it is the norm for employees to be saving in a pension, with a contribution from their employer. But getting people saving is only the start; there is still plenty more that employers can do to make ...
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OpinionMatthew Morris: Blockchain will have a major impact on employee benefits
Blockchain. It has become a buzzword in fintech. Blockchain first rose to prominence as the platform on which the digital money Bitcoin runs, but the essence of blockchain technology has now progressed to smart contracts, which has huge implications for the world of HR and employee benefits.A blockchain is a ...
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OpinionEdward Houghton: The best reward strategies are often data driven
Reward and pay are fundamentally important factors for helping to attract, retain and engage employees at work. Given the availability and increasing prominence of data systems to HR professionals, the best strategies are now, more often than not, data-driven: both in their development and in their communication. To succeed today, ...
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OpinionWill Sandbrook: How can we improve workers’ financial wellbeing today through to retirement?
Over half of employers say that poor financial wellbeing has had a detrimental impact on their workers’ performance, according to The DNA of financial wellbeing report, published by Neyber in May 2017. It is therefore unsurprising that this is an issue on many employers’ minds.Auto-enrolment has certainly helped the UK ...
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OpinionLovewell's logic: Should employers do more to support working fathers?
How supportive is your organisation of working fathers? Do they feel able to take parental leave or does this continue to be perceived as a benefit primarily for female employees, particularly in the first year of their child’s life?Research published by Hays in New Zealand earlier this week found that ...
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OpinionTim Middleton: How should pensions communications be adapted for part-time and job-share employees?
Over the past decade, there has been a marked increase in the number of people working part-time. The need for flexibility in the workforce has seen many people take on more than one job and large employers can no longer assume that the majority of their employees are full-time. This ...
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OpinionRaoul Parekh: Why are more dads not taking shared parental leave?
Let’s turn our minds back to 2015, when employment lawyers and HR professionals were busying themselves by poring over the five sets of regulations that established the new shared parental leave regime. We prepared clear, straightforward policies for employees. We designed simple forms, and carefully uploaded them to the organisation ...
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OpinionSally Hart: What are the latest trends in promoting voluntary benefits?
No longer limited to generic vouchers, voluntary benefits now form a significant part of the overall reward package. In promoting a wider range of benefits, one size no longer fits all.Increasingly, employers are customising benefits communications to help employees make relevant choices. HR data is used to tailor content to ...
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OpinionLovewell's Logic: When benefits lose their appeal
Last week, I came across an article about a publishing company (in no way related to Employee Benefits) offering its employees the opportunity to purchase an extra day’s holiday over the Christmas period. In itself, this is not unusual. It is a benefit we regularly cover; while putting the search ...
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OpinionAnne-Marie Winton: Auto-enrolment compliance under the spotlight
The latest workplace pensions scheme figures indicate that, as of July 2017, more than eight million workers are enrolled by approximately 650,000 employers. With an additional 50,000 schemes on the horizon, it would be easy to think that the automatic-enrolment regime is now fully bedded down and compliance, including for ...
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OpinionPhilip Woolham: The rising state pension age: another turn of the screw for employers
Over the summer, the government announced that the state pension age would reach 68 by 2039, not 2046. If this happens, thousands of people will wait longer for state pensions. But is this such a big change?By itself, perhaps not. But the state pension is, for many, the largest part ...
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OpinionSarah Thompson: How employers can prepare for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
We conducted a poll in May to see how many employers were preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force next May. Two fifths (41%) said that 'we were aware of the law but were not taking any action'; 12% were not aware of it. It is ...
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OpinionSue Baker: Employers have many options to create an open working environment that supports mental health
Working with employers from a variety of sectors over the last six years has given us a good indication of what works to ensure a mentally healthy workplace, and these key elements are incorporated into the Time to Change Employer Pledge. This gives organisations the opportunity to demonstrate their commitment ...
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OpinionJo Dodds: Wellbeing and engagement can improve organisational performance
The Marmot Review, published in February 2010 showed that work can either be good or bad for health.Within the Engage for Success movement, we understand that there is not one particular definition of what employee engagement is. When our founders, David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, researched Engaging for Success, otherwise ...
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OpinionSam Kirk: What impact do employee benefits have on engagement at TalkTalk?
I will be honest, I often wrestle with the term 'employee engagement' and wonder whether it has just become a buzz phrase we use in HR in order to encourage our stakeholders to focus on what we should be doing anyway.As HR practitioners, we are all familiar with the concept ...
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OpinionDr Zofia Bajorek: Integrating health and wellbeing with good work can lead to employee engagement
Over the last decade, there is no denying that ‘employee engagement’ has become a buzzword in both the academic and business world. Not a week goes by where engagement is not mentioned in articles concerning employee wellbeing, productivity and what employers can do to improve methods through which they value ...
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OpinionDr Matthew Connell: Start the conversation about group risk benefits
In many ways, group risk benefits are the best benefits employers can offer their staff.If an employee does not have an adequate pension, they can work longer to save for one, provided they are healthy. But if someone loses their ability to work because of illness, there is no plan ...
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OpinionSimon Richardson: How to motivate staff without providing a pay increase
Reward managers of a certain age could be forgiven for looking back nostalgically to the certainty of their role in the ‘80s and ‘90s where their main objective was to produce ever-increasing reward packages while times were good, and deliver a generous pay off when times were bad. Although the ...
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OpinionProfessor Chris Rowley: HR management can prove vital for merger and acquisition success
Employees are all too often the invisible ‘forgotten army’ in mergers and acquisitions, because these events are frequently thought of and presented in isolation as easy, glamorous takeovers with important consequences, typically regarding financial and market shares.However, these are not only overly simplistic and narrow process views, but also ethnocentric, ...