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Affluent customers for years have turned to “concierge” medical care to escape crowded waiting rooms, receive more personalized attention, and gain access a wider range of treatments without long waits and bureaucratic runaround.
Employee health matters. Sick employees are less productive, and the costs of treating their chronic illnesses pile up. Employers have a vested interest in helping employees live healthy lifestyles and manage their health effectively.
In my role as Post Loss Specialist, I work daily to help clients manage their workers compensation claims and protect their experience modification rating (MOD). With recent changes in the split-rate formula for rating calculations, businesses need to be even more diligent in managing reserves and claim outcomes.
No one expects violence in the workplace, but this is a very real concern that all risk managers need to address. It is important to have a policy in place for workplace violence and make sure employees know how to report any threat that does arise.
Over the past year, we’ve held nearly 40 HNI University events both virtually and live in the Milwaukee, Chicago, and Grand Rapids areas. Our HNI University seminars are designed to be intensive learning experiences targeted toward business leaders, HR professionals, and risk managers.
Benefits continue to become an increasingly important component of total compensation. Is your health plan keeping pace? According to USA Today, benefits have reached an all-time high for “proportion of the paycheck,” reaching 19.7% of overall compensation.
We visited the home page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel yesterday to find this picture front and center. See anything unusual??
If you’ve spent much time on our blog, you’ve likely heard the phrase “wicked problem” a number of times. At HNI, we use this term to describe the deeper, more complex issues that are really at the heart of risk for businesses.
Leaders are constantly called on to solve problems. 99% of the time, these problems miss the point. There is usually something much bigger behind the fires they’re being asked to put out, and many make the mistake of focusing on the symptoms, not the root cause: the WICKED problem.
If you hack away at the symptoms of a Wicked Problem, fresh problems will constantly be flaring up. And putting out fires is the exact opposite of implementing new ideas. More of one equals less of the other. You have to attack the Wicked Problems themselves in order to leave a lasting effect.
Wicked Problems can’t solved by simply writing a check [or purchasing an insurance policy]. To solve wicked problems, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s your team. Usually, it’s a combination of people in any given company that contribute to a wicked problem [and its eventual solution, if you’re willing to take it head on.]
Some examples may help illustrate what we mean by problems that are truly wicked. In general, there are 4 categories of wicked problems we generally see in businesses: 1) Leadership 2) Brand 3) Culture 4) Financial.
· Lack of succession/perpetuation plan
· Strategy formation / Blue Ocean Strategy
· Change Management
· Cultivating effective second in commends
· Streamlining and improving core business processes
· Achieving smart, focused growth
· Radical differentiation in the minds of your customers
· Brand and sales messaging
· Social transformation internally and externally
· Changes in the marketplace and customer demands that may be out of your hands
· Employee Engagement
· Struggling to recruit and retain top talent
· Managing the generational gap
· Getting employees to act like owners
· Getting buy-in into safety and wellness
· Keeping up with the social transformation taking place in the business world
· Rising costs of employee benefits [and managing health care reform]
· Failure to understand your total cost of risk
· Insufficient cash flow to drive growth
· Unaddressed expense areas
No matter which area of the business a wicked problem resides, it generally is in some way connected back to culture. People are the wickedest problem of all. I don’t mean this negatively – it’s just that our employees are incredibly complex and diverse individuals, and influencing their behavior is one of the most difficult things to achieve.
You may want to start by asking your people – it’s often interesting to see how their answers compare to your own.
HNI works with high-performing companies to help them address the hidden risks in their business and avoid The Insurance Dependency Trap. This is done by proactively DE-RISKING their business so they can be less dependent on insurance.
HNI also offers the basic services of insurance and employee benefits. HNI has offices in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis.