Editor's note

Employee benefits can help your business stand out from your competitors. Your people are the crucial system supporting your organization’s ability to grow and thrive. So how crucial are employee benefits to accomplishing your company’s goals and objectives? Offering benefits to your employees shows them you are invested in not only their health and wellbeing but also their future. A solid employee benefits package is the go-to tool to attract and retain the best talent in the market. 
 

The benefits landscape is ever-changing. It is a challenge for human resources professionals and benefits fund administrators alike to navigate the moving goal-posts of our industry as policies and requirements - such as individual mandates, new required minimum distributions and taxes on student loan benefits - change. From a legislative perspective, HR professionals and administrators can expect changes that drastically affect the benefits industry over the next year, each bringing their own changes our industry should watch. 

Read this month’s cover article Benefits Trends Ahead: What HR Professionals Should Watch For In 2020 by Zane Dalal, to know what’s in stores for HR professionals in 2020 and effects of these policies on the benefits industries.  

Around 88 percent of United States employees care for a loved one who is aging in place, 36 percent are long-distance caregivers and 60 percent have senior loved ones with cognitive or medical issues, according to a 2018 report by Torchlight. If you’re a family caregiver, Deb Hipp’s article 5 Employee Benefits That Can Help Family Caregivers, may help you find a life and work balance, financial reimbursement or help to locate care with these employee caregiver benefits.

According to a recent report, the US is one of the least family-friendly of the world’s richest countries, and the only one that offers no statutory paid maternity or paternity leave. The research also mentioned that men now face a ‘paternity paradox’, of wanting successful careers and being devoted fathers, experiencing the same difficulties that women have encountered for generations when it comes to balancing work and children. What can organizations do to support working parents? Teresa Hopke, in her article, Forgotten American Fathers, talks about how extending fathers’ parental leave will help address the paternity paradox.
  
Why has it become a rare scenario in today’s world for an employee to celebrate a milestone work anniversary? Would you best-performing employee leave your company if s/he feels invested in them, s/he career, and s/he life goals? Read Lesley Lyons’ article Why The Benefits Broker You Choose Matters, to learn how to keep your employees celebrating their 45-year work anniversaries and beyond. 

This is not all! We have a variety of other informative articles on The Future of Employee Benefits. We hope you enjoy reading all the articles and get back to us with your valuable feedback.