The Ultimate HR Challenge? Achieve your strategic goals while meeting your employees priorities.

Transcription

1 The Ultimate HR Challenge? Achieve your strategic goals while meeting your employees priorities. June 14, 2011 Webinar Question & Answer Session Transcript Speakers: Children s Healthcare of Atlanta: Beth Strickland, Vice President, Total Rewards DLA Piper LLP (US): Stephanie Riedel, Benefits Manager Work/Life Programs American Express Company: Jim Dwyer, Vice President, Employee Benefits Moderator: Dave Lissy, CEO, Bright Horizons Bright Horizons Family Solutions, LLC

2 Jim, what has been the response from your employees to the enhancements you've made in these educational benefits and the other work/life solutions? Jim: We've seen an immediate interest level. I mentioned earlier that our normal annual usage is about 1,000 employees per year. We have seen so far in the first quarter an uptake that would trend toward about 1,600 employees in the full year of So we've seen a pretty considerable increase in registrations for tuition. Beth and Stephanie, how do you make the case to your executive management to continue to support these resources that support your employees? I think we do a pretty good job of updating our executives on the metrics. And we have a full scorecard showing enrollment, program participation, and the financials, and really demonstrating that the retention has been really solid and improving over time. I would echo what Beth said. I would also say that we are fortunate that senior leadership realizes that retention is a key, key issue for us and that continuing to offer the programs that people are used to and providing that sense of stability is very critical to us. And so the fact that we have the numbers to back it up, coupled with that, is what is working for us. Beth, about how many employees does Children's Hospital of Atlanta have? Children's Healthcare of Atlanta has about 7,600 employees. There've been a variety of questions that have come in related to the costs associated with child care centers and/or back-up care. I want to take that question because it really does depend on a number of factors, not the least of which is obviously your employee population, your demographics, the amount of cost-sharing that exists between the co-pays that employees are charged versus what the organization picks up, and that does differ. Each employer customizes their solution to make it right for their employee population. And so I think that, with respect to the costs of back-up care and/or centers, the best way to get specific information is for us to be back in touch with you individually and just answer specific questions about your workforce Bright Horizons Family Solutions, LLC

3 Jim, Beth, and What are you doing to assist your employees with longterm behavioral change to enhance wellness and well-being? I think that when we look at our employees' well-being and the wellness efforts that we've made, we've been year-over-year continuing to offer new programs. And for example, health risk assessment used to be something that we just had voluntarily. Now you get a premium reduction if you do a health risk assessment. We also have some disease management programs. We're looking to see if there is a way that we can offer some sort of incentive for people that participate in those programs, although we are not there yet. Jim: Yes, I think that we followed the same path. We do provide modest incentives for participation. We are this year moving our incentives to a bigger ask for employees. In our first year and second year, we were looking for participation, but this year we are looking for a stronger level of commitment on their physical activity. Next year, we will consider tying screening and a health assessment to actual enrollment. We haven't gotten quite there yet. So we are trying to up the game in increments that are not overwhelming to the normal individual, but also are clearly asking for them to give in order to get. I think the other thing that we've found successful and has really helped some of our behavioral change across the organization is culturally we have used employees as the spokespeople and models for either losing weight or staying healthier. And what we've found is that colleagues like hearing about other colleagues' successes. And it can be inspiring and also very positive in our work environment. So those are some of the triggers that we're using. We did offer a modest incentive for participating in the Strides program last year and have plans to that again this year. I will be honest with you, it has been a struggle for us to identify the "sweet spot" for that - the magic number that is enough to incentivize people to participate without spending our entire wellness budget on incentives. So rather than make it all about the incentive, we try to speak to the age old question of "what's in it for me?" by communicating the intrinsic value of practicing healthy behaviors. Does Bright Horizons provide these types of services outside of the United States? Today, Bright Horizons operates fully in four countries in the United States and Canada, in the UK and Ireland. We will be operational in India in the fall. We are opening our first employer-sponsored childcare center in India, in Bangalore, in September. In fact, many of our U.S. clients also partner with us to provide services for their international employees, including American Express, Capitol One, Cisco Systems, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Our consulting practice frequently does global engagements for our clients. We can obtain good data and information about trends in many countries around the world, including identifying the providers of choice to allow us to manage a network of providers in places where we're not operational Bright Horizons Family Solutions, LLC

4 What is the typical timeline for the opening of a child care center? The answer to that question really does turn on space availability and the condition of the spaces that you have, on-site or near-site. And certainly we can give you advice on space and we have expertise inhouse that can come out and take a look at space and give you ideas of timelines for construction, licensing, and all the other things it takes to get states' licenses for child care. On average, I'd say it's about a year process from start to getting a center opened. That's the typical timeframe. Does Bright Horizons partner with EAP providers for back-up child care? We are frequently asked by our clients to partner up with Employee Assistance Programs or other programs for that matter for the purposes of streamlining the offering to employees. And we do that pretty consistently for our clients. And in some cases, we're even partnering with EAPs upfront to make that service streamlined to any client population. So the answer to that question is, yes. Beth, first, what is the child care credit? And secondly, what is your philosophy on subsidizing the cost of child care? The child care credit is: If people elect the child care spending account through the FSA at annual enrollment, we will give them back a $40 credit. That money goes to them for usage and paying their child care expenses. Our philosophy as far as subsidy, we're always looking at the affordability, we are looking at the average pay of our employees. And the $40 subsidy certainly is one piece of it. That's $40 per pay period, and we have 26 pay periods a year. But as far as the additional subsidies, we do have some discounts at some other child care centers. And at the Bright Horizons center, our employees do pay for the care that they get there, although it is slightly less than maybe a market competitive rate might be. And we also have the sliding scales in our health plan for some of our lower paid people as well as in the child care centers Bright Horizons Family Solutions, LLC

5 Jim: What tips would you give someone who is just at the beginning stages of creating a strategy like the one you've all talked about for our organization? I would say the first thing that we've done any time we are embarking on something new is to find out what the employees want. That can either be done through surveys or focus groups. But that's always been one of our first steps in any process. I think Stephanie hit the nail on the head. Listening to employees, both anecdotally as well as reading through comments from different forums like the survey, I think is really the first place to start. I agree wholeheartedly. We certainly surveyed our employees then. We survey them an ongoing basis. We ask them what it is that they're after and then we do our very best to tie it to the overarching business strategy, and that's how we get the executive support. The Consulting Practice at Bright Horizons assists organizations in such assessments that can determine employees work/life issues, how those issues affect the organization s objectives, and what solutions will address those issues. Assessments can range in scope from targeted for projecting the demand for child care services, to a broader objective such as achieving employer of choice status. For 25 years, Bright Horizons has been the world s leading provider of employer-sponsored family care supports. More than 800 leading employers have chosen us as their partner in creating work environments that support the needs of employees and their families Bright Horizons Family Solutions, LLC