Financial wellness has an immense impact on an individual’s health, life, and work. Because of this, employees are looking to their employer for help managing their financial stressors.

Employers are uniquely positioned to provide support in the form of benefits, education, and other resources to their workforce. As a plan sponsor, you have the ability to offer a suite of resources that meet your employees wherever they are in their financial wellness journey and help prepare them to confidently take their next steps toward better financial wellness today, tomorrow, and long into the future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s a reality. It's becoming a practical tool for HR teams when strategizing compliance and compensation. For professionals navigating pay transparency laws, shifting employee expectations and tight labor markets, AI offers both opportunities and questions.

• How can AI support more equitable, strategic compensation decisions?
• How do we ensure that automation complements, rather than replaces, human insight?

This post explores how AI is changing compensation practices, with a focus on actionable use cases, ethical considerations and tools that balance innovation with accountability.

Primary care physicians and advanced practice professionals provide a gateway to better health. They enable and direct preventive care, which in turn plays a significant role in helping people avoid chronic diseases, reducing overall health care costs.

Those benefits are quantifiable. For example, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion reports that breast cancer screenings can reduce breast cancer deaths among 50- to 74-year-old women by 26% while promoting early diagnosis and reducing health care spending¹.

Employers seeking to mitigate risk and manage rising healthcare costs should be mindful of the need to strengthen their social contract with their workforce. That’s going to make it critical to step up their game with voluntary benefits: the more effectively they harness the power of their employee benefits data to get there, the better it’ll serve everyone’s interests.

Smarter use of analytics can help you design and offer health plans tailored to which employee groups they best suit – from low-wage earners to executives. Given the abundance of new benefits products and vendors, using employee benefits analytics is also a great way to clear the mud so you can focus on products that are the best fit for employees with unique needs.

In the world of Leave of Absence (LOA) administration, each employer must decide whether to insource or outsource their LOA case management process. There are pros and cons for both strategies and even when outsourcing, there will be oversight. This article attempts to explore the factors an employer may consider when deciding on their LOA administration strategy.  

Insourcing LOA administration refers to managing these requests internally within your own organization. Typically, insourced or in-house LOA administration utilizes the employer’s own employees as part of an LOA group or team (i.e., case managers) and LOA case management software. This approach allows organizations to maintain direct control over the administration process, ensuring that policies are consistently applied and aligned with company culture. Alternatively, the outsourcing of LOA administration is exactly what it sounds like – it typically involves hiring a third-party administrator (TPA) or insurer to manage LOA administration on behalf of the organization. This option can take advantage of the TPA/insurer’s scalability, expertise, streamlined processes, and potentially reduce administrative burdens.