Last Tuesday, Starbucks announced a new childcare benefit as part of their overall compensation plan. The coffee giant partnered with Care.com to give the option for employees to pay $1 per hour for in-home childcare or $5 per day for care in a center.
Attracting and retaining top talent is necessary to build effective teams that are strong, motivated, and a great cultural fit for the company. Employees want to be rewarded for their work, and employers have started to look beyond traditional hiring bonuses and benefits as a means of making sure employees feel valued, according to one workplace authority.
As Time Warner and IBM join the growing list of companies that plan to stop offering health insurance benefits to retirees, one workplace expert suggests that the moves are simply the first steps in eliminating health insurance from the corporate balance sheet for all employees; former and current.
This week, Kate Middleton and Prince William's much anticipated and oft discussed pregnancy ended with a baby boy. Prince William will take a 2 weeks paid paternity leave from the Royal Air Force, sparking debates worldwide about paternity policies. For companies, determining whether you must offer paternity, possibly due to federal or state regulations, or want to offer it as a benefit for retention and recruitment purposes is important.
Does your company have a paternity policy? Is it similar to maternity leave? Is it offered consistently across all levels of the company?
Despite the potential for increased costs and more regulatory red tape, 82 percent of companies recently surveyed by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. plan to continue providing health care coverage to their workers when the employee mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act goes into effect on January 1, 2014.
Challenger focused on telecommuting trends, specifically the announcements by Yahoo and Best Buy to suspend that option, bad leadership, and companies' response to the Affordable Care Act at this year's SHRM conference held in Chicago.