Rhodes-Joseph

Tobiason Advisors

EMPLOYEE BENEFITS ADVISORY SERVICES

Rhodes-Joseph & Tobiason Advisors, LLC
1177 High Ridge Road
Stamford, CT 06905

Rhodes-Joseph & Tobiason Advisors

Managing Benefits Now™

MetLife's 10th Annual Study of Employee Benefits Trends

March 2012: MetLife released its 10th Annual Study of Employee Benefits Trends. It's a comprehensive analysis of employee benefits today, trends for the future and how employers and employees view employee benefits.

Here are some highlights from this year's study:

Employers increasingly recognize that employee benefits can drive workforce strategies.

The current economic conditions provide opportunities to increase employee options; in the future, employee paid benefits will be a more important part of employer benefits strategy than they are today.

Benefits are important for attracting employees, even in difficult economic conditions, and they are even more important for retaining employees and helping them keep focused on their work.

Employees continue to look to employers for financial security through employee benefits; the workplace remains the preferred place for employees to obtain benefits.

There are differences among generations as to how they look at employee benefits and between how employers and employees perceive the value of these plans.

More employers are seeing financial wellness and security as a partnership with their employees; there's a growing awareness that employers benefit from a financially secure workforce.

Many employees believe that their employee benefits are an important consideration in their decisions to stay or leave a company; there's a strong relationship between benefits and job satisfaction.

Read more in MetLife's study, available HERE (MetLife's website).

BEYOND WELLNESS: The Lifetime Wellness Plan

In the heat of the summer, thoughts turn to autumn and annual enrollment for 2011. More and more employers will be introducing or expanding Wellness initiatives next year.

Here's a new way to think about these programs.

Concern for health of employees and their families will lead employers and their vendor partners to move beyond today's wellness programs to Lifetime Wellness Planning.

Just as employees are encouraged to take the long view in financial and retirement planning, where actions while working yield benefits both for today and for retirement, we see Lifetime Wellness Planning becoming accepted as equally vital. Each employee and family member should have an individual Lifetime Wellness Plan that will prompt and support healthy behaviors − generating real "health investment returns" both while working and after retirement for a lifetime.