Is another form of mandatory employee leave on the horizon?  Beginning December 13, 2007 most New York employers must give employees who work 20 hours or more at least 3 hours of leave to donate blood within any 12 month period.  Illinois requires certain employers that let employees take time off to donate blood to use up to one hour of paid leave every 56 days.

Employers contemplating cutting back on medical benefits might want to mull this: A new survey shows that workers place an extremely high value on health care coverage.

In fact, according to a survey of 1,200 adults sponsored by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, 84 percent of the respondents said that health insurance has become a “very important” characteristic when choosing a new job.

In fact, medical insurance outranked all other 14 benefits and offerings in the survey. Remarkably, pay ranked 10th on the survey—right below “being creative and intellectually stimulated.”

Another benefit—the corporate pension plan—ranked fourth, cited by 76 percent of respondents as being most important when evaluating a potential job.

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Reprinted from Workforce.com. Filed by Mark Bruno of Financial Week.

Cost increases for U.S. group health care plans continue to hold steady as more employers take steps to keep spending under control. Most often, employer healthcare spending controls results in higher employee out of pocket spending via higher copays and deductibles. Unfortunately it’s the small employers with under 200 employees that feel the rising premium affects the worse and as a result fewer and fewer are able to afford to offer employee healthcare benefits. Group health plan costs increased 6.1 percent this year to an average of $7,983 per employee, up from $7,523 last year, according to a survey of nearly 3,000 employers released last month by Mercer.

Remember Clark Griswold sweating out receiving his Christmas bonus check to cover the downpayment on a new swimming pool in National Lampoon's all time Holiday classic, Christmas Vacation? Nearly every time I watch that movie with other people, the question invariably gets asked, "Have you ever received a Christmas Bonus?" A conversation then follows where individuals offer up their best, or worst Christmas bonus stories. I have noticed a trend over the years that fewer and fewer people can say they currently receive any kind of specific holiday bonus. Most concede they and their spouses are invited to attend a company "holiday event" such as a lunch or dinner party and/or are presented with a nominal gift card or voucher for a Holiday turkey, ham or cheese roll. Holiday social events and nominal gifts are looked forward to, appreciated and acknowledged, but really not considered by the worker to be a "bonus" even though providing them is completely optional and costs the company thousands of dollars to provide.

In a continuation of yesterday's posting . . . here are tips 6 - 15 from the HRN white paper entitled "Congratulations! You're a Supervisor. Now What?". Tips 1-5 were posted 12/20. To view and download the complete white paper go to: http://www.hrnonline.com/promo/freeNewsletter.asp. Click on the "Current Whitepaper" link. You can also quickly sign up to receive free monthly HR industry white papers.

As a service to the HR community, HRN Management Group researches and publishes monthly HR industry white papers. These informative documents can be received, at no cost, around the middle of each month simply by subscribing on the HRN website (http://www.hrnonline.com/promo/freeNewsletter.asp). Typically we do not post white papers to our blog but this month's has relevance to a much wider audience than the professional HR community. The white paper is for both new, and perhaps not so new, supervisors and managers and offers 15 tips to help them better understand and be more effective in their supervisory role. Today's posting includes tips 1 through 5. Tomorrow for my regular HR Fact Friday posting, I will include tips 6 through 15.

The power of the Blogosphere. Looks like others are paying attention to the retirement savings issue and looking for ways to encourage employees to enroll in retirement savings plans. Automatic enrollment is a good start . . . but what good is automatic enrollment if the employer has a 6-month or 12-month waiting period for plan participation eligibility?

#1. if an employee changes employers 5 times in their career, and each employer has a 12 month waiting period, that's 5 years out of 30 (16%!) that they will be inelligible for contributing to a retirement savings plan.

#2. En employee, especially early in their working career, is less likely to enroll after a 12 month period because they have become accustomed to budgeting their finances based on their paycheck prior to any 401(k) contributions being withheld. They will have a perception that they can't afford to bring home 3% less in their paycheck (even if the company is matching their contribution). In reality they are turning down a 3% pay increase because of the company match. And the 3% employee contribution is pre-tax so it's effect on the bottom line take home pay is hardly noticable.

With all that said . . . I was happy to read the article below that was posted this week on Workforce.com titled "Lawmakers Urge Ending 401(k) Waiting Periods"  (http://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/25/26/36.html).

The report found that more than one out of every three American workers born in 1990 will have zero dollars in a 401(k) or other similar style retirement savings plan! The GAO report estimated 36.8 percent of today's 17-year-olds will have no money in a 401(k) or similar plan when they retire. The numbers will be worse for low-income workers: 63 percent of them will have zero dollars in a 401(k)-type account when it comes time for them to retire.

In training, and in these postings, I often repeat myself by emphasizing that a supervisor who engages in a personal romantic relationship with a co-worker is involved in highly-risky behavior that could lead to lawsuits, job loss, marital difficulties and ruined careers. Such relationships usually create conflicts of interest and often lead to sexual harassment claims if/when the relationship ends. Recent news headlines may provide another example of the problems related to such relationships. The American Red Cross recently fired its CEO for engaging in a personal relationship with another Red Cross employee, perhaps one he supervised. The Red Cross, while not releasing details of the matter, stated that it concluded the married CEO had used poor judgment in the situation and that his ability to lead the Red Cross was diminished as a result.