Over the past several years having some form of wellness program for your employees has gone from a cutting edge forward thinking trend, to a mainstream part of many employer’s benefit plans. While the catalysts for this immense growth in the wellness movement are varied depending on the stakeholders involved, most of the changes in strategy, whether being implemented by healthcare providers, the health insurance industry, or even the federal government, are focused on preventative healthcare.

How much should you pay your employees? Why should you have a compensation strategy? And when was the last time you reviewed your strategy? 

Executive compensation plans come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes depending on what business objectives the organization is aiming to achieve, the desired complexity of the plans, the demographics of the organization in terms of size, revenue, and industry/sector, as well as the various legal stipulations that apply to executive pay.

As college tuition rates continue to rise, offering employees an opportunity to go back to school and earn a bachelor or a master’s degree has increased in value. Many employers have taken advantage of the opportunity to boost their benefits package and offer tuition reimbursement to their employees.

Sue Bailey is a Senior Consultant at ERC with more than 25 years experience in the HR, compensation, and benefits field. We sat down with Bailey to answer a few questions about benefits and compensation in the workplace.

With the changing health insurance and benefits landscape, there is a great deal of confusion occurring in the workforce, and the upcoming open enrollment season will be different than others in the past. Employers will be faced with the need to communicate and educate employees on health care reform and the benefits options available to them. In addition, organizations may be forced to identify alternative health care options or modify existing ones to cope with rising costs.

Employee wellness continues to expand and change in the workplace as organizations use wellness programs to combat rising health care costs and support the development of healthy lifestyles in their workforce. Here's an overview of the state of employee wellness, and specifically 4 important wellness trends you need to know including an analysis of employer programs and practices, incentives, return on investment and drivers of effectiveness, and new things employers are doing in the area of wellness.

We’ve compiled a brief compensation and benefits planning and budgeting guide to help your organization make important pay, health care, and benefits decisions this fall and into 2014. The guide summarizes the latest and most important trends we’re seeing related to administering compensation, health care, and benefits, which affect your organization as it plans for 2014.

Based on the results of the 2013-2014 ERC Policies & Benefits survey, Northeast Ohio employers are well positioned to take advantage of the recently released Affordable Care Act (ACA) regulations increasing the maximum rewards employers may offer employees for participation in wellness programs. Local employers have consistently outpaced the national averages in terms of their wellness initiatives, with specific programs illustrated in Figure 1 below.

Internet and email use has unquestionably become a necessary part of conducting business for the vast majority of organizations and their employees. According to the bi-annual ERC Policies & Benefits Survey, the percent of organizations with employees accessing the internet has remained fairly constant since 2008, at about 96% of non-union employees. The largest variation in this accessibility is found, unsurprisingly, among non-union maintenance and production workers, where access may vary according to specific job duties or departments at about 30% of organizations.