Opinion – Page 63
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OpinionMichael Jenkins: Empower staff to work in a healthy way to support cardiovascular health
In a world where we are increasingly exposed to longer working hours, reduced time for exercise, an increased sugar intake and weight gain, focusing on health in the workplace could not be more important.The Circulation Foundation, the charity affiliated to the Vascular Society of Great Britain and Ireland, is committed ...
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OpinionClare Gregory: Grey areas could lead to gender pay gap reporting inconsistencies
Wednesday 5 April 2017 marks the ‘snapshot’ date when organisations with more than 250 employees must collect data to calculate their mean and median gender pay and bonus gaps. Employers will be required to publish this information, with the first comparison due to be published by 4 April 2018 and ...
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OpinionSusan Ball: What do the changes to salary sacrifice mean for employers?
With publication of the Finance Bill, the final legislation around changes to salary sacrifice is now available, and considerably more pages have been added. Given the volume of additional legislative text, coupled with the short timeframe between publication and the 6 April 2017 effective date, employers face significant practical difficulties ...
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OpinionLovewell's logic: Tackling the issues behind gender pay gaps
How prepared is your organisation for the incoming gender pay gap reporting requirements?Is this seen as a box-ticking exercise to be completed by the deadline or have you already engaged with the requirements and are planning to voluntarily publish your organisation’s data before required to do so in April next ...
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OpinionLovewell's logic: Supporting staff in times of crisis
On Wednesday, a pleasant afternoon selecting the menu for this year’s Employee Benefits Awards and Summer Party was brought to a rather abrupt conclusion as news of the terror attack in Westminster began to filter through.Such events are always truly shocking, particularly when they occur so close to home. As ...
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OpinionMalcolm Hurlston: Employee endorsement of share plans is invaluable
Life is a busy place and our attention is at a premium as we are assailed by nudges prompts and messages, virtual and real. It is the same for employees only more so: share plans account for a fraction of what interests them.Yet from an organisation's point of view, other ...
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OpinionTim Gosling: Higher contribution rates will bring savers closer to retirement targets
With the 2017 review of automatic-enrolment approaching, the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) spent 2016 researching adequacy in pension saving. Together with Hymans Robertson, we used data on pension wealth and other savings to build a picture of what retirement incomes could be for the population of Britain, assuming ...
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OpinionLovewell's logic: How popular was the Spring Budget?
I think the benefits industry breathed a collective sigh of relief earlier this week when it became clear that the Spring Budget didn’t include any major announcements impacting reward.But that’s not to say that all of the announcements were popular. Buried in the supporting policy documentation was confirmation that the ...
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OpinionKirstie Axtens: True flexibility is essential for carers' work-life balance
Working Families published the 2017 Modern Families Index in January. This found that one in five parents and carers who are working full time are putting in five extra weeks a year, the equivalent of their annual holiday allowance, in unpaid work. They are stressed and burnt out. Disappointingly, over ...
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OpinionNaomi Brown: How will the new Pension Schemes Bill affect employers?
Since the introduction of automatic-enrolment, many new master trusts have entered the pensions market, offering a solution for employers that want the benefits of a trust-based scheme without the cost and time of setting up and running their own arrangement. While there are clear advantages to providing defined contribution (DC) ...
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OpinionDavid Baxter: Executive remuneration and the future of the long-term incentive plan
Many listed organisations will be putting their directors’ remuneration policy back to shareholders at the 2017 annual general meeting (AGM) for the first time since 2014. Renewal of the policy comes against a background of increasing calls for executive pay restraint and the risk of another ‘shareholder spring’ if investors ...
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OpinionLorraine Heard: Time for the public sector to mind the gender pay gap
From next April, all employers with 250 or more employees will have to collect and publish gender pay gap data annually, including: their mean and median gender pay gap; their mean and median gender bonus pay gap; the proportions of male and females in each pay quartile; the proportions of ...
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OpinionAmanda Latham: High standards of governance bring value for pension scheme members
The pensions landscape has changed dramatically in recent years and is still evolving. Automatic enrolment is bringing millions of new savers into pensions each year. By 2020, the figure is expected to be 10 million, with the vast majority of newly enrolled savers being enrolled into large defined contribution (DC) ...
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OpinionEmma Hart: Technology has made a significant impact on employee engagement at Visualsoft
At Visualsoft, we are firm believers in collecting feedback from all employees and making positive actions as a result. The challenge we faced was how we engage with our employees and collate the feedback we receive. We found using a fortnightly micro-survey to be a huge success, giving employees the ...
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OpinionJoe Wiggins: How is workplace transparency impacting employee engagement?
Greater transparency in the workplace means that the balance of power is shifting more towards employees. Job seekers used to be in the dark, in the sense that the employer would hold all the cards from the moment someone walked through the door for an interview. Information about salary, the ...
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OpinionNita Clarke: Engaging employees will help organisations face the future with confidence
More and more organisations are coming to realise that how they run their business is as important as what they do. That culture really does eat strategy for breakfast, and that getting the workplace culture right is the precondition for meeting the myriad challenges that every employer, in the public, ...
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OpinionBridging the employee engagement gap
There is an engagement gapAlmost three-quarters (71%) of business leaders surveyed by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services for the report The impact of employee engagement on performance, published in September 2013, said that employee engagement was critical to their long-term success. But only 24% of the same people described their ...
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OpinionRita Trehan: Traditional employee engagement strategies will soon lead nowhere
Organisations across the globe who pay lip service to employment strategies speak of keeping employees engaged. Although maintaining staff motivation is essential in keeping any business competitive, a report by Steelcase, Engagement and the global workplace, published in May 2016, reveals that only one in three employees feel engaged with ...
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OpinionKevin Gude: Salary sacrifice changes risk turning certain health benefits into luxuries
The forthcoming changes to salary sacrifice rules, in particular, the effect on health screening and other medical benefits, reflect a carelessly fragmented attitude towards the nation’s wellbeing and fitness. As the NHS struggles to meet the needs of an ageing, increasingly long-living but unfit population, the Treasury is withdrawing its ...
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OpinionMarc Jones: Key compliance considerations for employers dealing with tips for staff
There are approximately 150,000 UK businesses in the hospitality, leisure and service sectors where tipping is common. These sectors employ some two million workers and are an important part of the UK economy. Concerns have been raised about employers’ treatment of tips, gratuities and service charges to workers and the ...