As the economy slowly improves, and employees begin to gain the upper hand in terms of job opportunities, employers are again trying to lure the best talent with top-notch benefits.  If a job prospect is being courted by two companies, then as long as the salaries are equal it often comes down to the "perks" of working for one company over the other.

That being said, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), those very same benefits that attracted a new hire are seldom used to retain high-performing employees.  Furthermore, those benefits may have changed and several major topics have emerged as being more important.  For example, flexible work arrangements and a wellness-oriented approached to employee health care dominate the wants of younger employees.

Alex Alonso, SHRM's vice president of research, said that many HR professionals recognize the importance of flexible work schedules to the millennial generation.  He further noted that flexible work schedules were a more valuable factor in recruiting top talent than in prior years.

The reason wellness-oriented health care has risen to prominence is that a greater number of employees are becoming more health conscious.  In addition, employers are pushing more of the costs of health care onto the employees themselves so it becomes more cost-effective to be sick less often.

Not surprisingly, as companies try to one-up each other for the best and brightest employees, there will always be something to tempt an employee to "jump ship" and work for another company with more and/or better benefits.
Human Resource departments will need to find ways to measure the return on investment (ROI) of their company's benefits and weigh the pros and cons of adding or improving them in order to retain superior workers. The cost of such a gain or loss in the quality of a company's workforce could be much more than the cost of the benefit.

As technology improves, and a generation of younger professionals starts populating the workforce, the desire to go "paperless" for everything in business becomes a driving force.  We can see it now in terms of the number of emails, blogs, websites, and other forms of electronic communications that have replaced more traditional forms of paper communications.

Human Resources departments are equally affected by the change and have adapted many of their benefit plan notices to be distributed to employees electronically.  It's far easier and faster to send information to an employee electronically, which is why it has become the preferred method.  However, paper communications are still the preferred method from a regulatory agency perspective.

While it's true that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) does permit certain documents to be communicated electronically, employers need to tread carefully when doing so.  According to an article in Employee Benefit News, employers can distribute many plan communications electronically, including summary plan descriptions, open enrollment materials, summaries of material modification, COBRA and HIPAA notices, and even the Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBC) required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).  Still, the rules for electronic distribution are different depending on whether employees have work-related computer access. The primary difference is the requirement of obtaining consent.

Something all HR professionals should consider, however, is a recent survey conducted by Jellyvision about benefits communications.  It revealed that almost a third of employees prefer direct, one-on-one communications with HR while only 19% prefer direct mail and fewer still -- 17% -- said that they prefer email or website notices.  That same survey found that of the employers surveyed, they most frequently use non-interactive, text-based formats for communicating benefits information.  At 62.5%, email led that type of communication followed by websites at 53.5%, and direct mail at 52.8%.

The crucial thing is to know your audience.  If, as a company, you have employees who prefer electronic communications to deliver their HR notices and you have any needed consent from the employees to do so, then go ahead.  Otherwise, any HR department would be wise to continue using paper documents as that will lead to less confusion among employees.

As an employee, we tend to be more engaged at work if we like the people we work with rather than the people we work for.  According to a survey from TINYpulse, relationships among co-workers are more responsible for their happiness than their managerial relationships by 23.3%!

These co-worker interactions, it seems, are not centered on being the same as each other.  You don't need to have the same problems, your kids don't need to play on the same team, and you don't need to go to the same place of worship.  What you do need to have, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), are the traits of team play and collaboration.  These proved to be far more desirable than knowledge and skills.

"This shows that who you work with is becoming more important than who you work for," said David Niu, founder and CEO of TINYpulse.  "We often think of employee happiness and satisfaction as being manager-driven, but now as the workplace becomes more cross-matrixed, collaborative and 'bottom-up,' the importance of co-worker relationships continues to grow."

All these working relations aside, the absolute most important factor of employee engagement is management transparency.  According to the survey by TINYpulse, workers are demanding transparency in their leadership including roles, responsibilities, and values as well as their company's missions and strategies.

Whether you're a C-level manager or a supervisor who is further down the ladder, it costs virtually nothing to improve your level of transparency.  How high your employees value this factor will vary, but what remains constant is the improvement in trust that's fostered and the advantage in employee productivity and retention.