Hello again! A lot has changed in the past year, but with fresh takes on office life, employee recognition, and work-life balance, 2022 is looking up! How are you spending your holidays (apart from reading Better Benefits)?

📚 Weekly Digest

​IDEO’s CEO, Sandy Speicher, Asks: What Is an Office Even For Now?​
The pandemic has changed the way we look at in-person work. How can the office function as sites for learning and relationship-building in this new age? IDEO CEO Sandy Speicher shares her thoughts. (25 minute read) Watch the full interview here.​

​Digital transformation helps employers build superior health benefit experiences​
Digital innovations can improve the health and mental wellness benefits employers provide. What factors should companies keep in mind when moving their health plans into the 21st century? (6 minute read)

​The Future of Work Is a 60-Year Career​
The coming decades promise increased longevity, and that means we could be seeing employees retiring later. To offset this, future careers will likely be more flexible, with less stringent hours and more time for life outside of work. (7 minute read)

💡 Benefits Spotlight

Employer appreciation matters. The mass exodus of employees from the workforce is often called "The Great Resignation," but it could just as easily be titled The Great Recognition — it seems that workers who feel expendable and unappreciated are the ones leaving in droves. And now, with the Omicron variant delaying office reopening, it's difficult to recognize remote employees for all they do. How can companies ensure that their employees are seen, heard, and appreciated, no matter where they are?

This week, we're spotlighting Workhuman, a comprehensive employee reward and recognition platform. Developed as a kind of community social media for companies large and small, Workhuman's suite of cloud-hosted tools create a network of recognition between coworkers and across teams.

Workhuman's products work together to, in their words, "create a culture of ongoing feedback." Their Social Recognition tool provides a simple way to recognize hard work and reward it within and across teams. Conversations allow individuals to ask for and receive feedback whenever they need and wherever they are in their project timeline. Workhuman also offers ways to celebrate life events and work milestones in a personal way. The company has also recently rolled out a variety of DE&I programs and tools.

The global switch to remote work has left many HR departments with the massive job of developing online avenues to make employees feel valued. Chris French, Workhuman's EVP of customer strategy, points out that companies should instead "[emplower] employees to recognize each other’s work. It's one of the few ways where, in this remote and hybrid setting, the people at the company can be part of the solution."​

Recognition is a benefit that many employers overlook or take for granted, but recent studies suggest that it could be crucial to attracting and retaining talent. 40% of employees who resigned in 2021 cited burnout as the leading cause, and 20% said that they resigned because they felt their contributions and ideas weren't valued at their previous position. Of those who found new jobs this year, 22% noted that they felt more cared for by their new employer.

A caring company culture is invaluable and difficult to measure, but tools like Workhuman leverage employee-experience-centered metrics and real-time feedback to find areas of improvement within company culture. With many jobs continuing remotely, it's on longer possible to pop by someone's desk for a quick check-in; still, day-to-day connection with workers is critical. "Even if you think your workplace culture respects employees, you should examine their subjective, daily experience," Workhuman cofounder and CEO Eric Mosley writes in a recent Wall Street Journal partner feature. "Respect must be a cultural habit."

Thinking of a robust and supportive company culture as an employee benefit is relatively new, but the mindset is spreading fast. Again from Chris French: "It’s similar to any kind of benefit, right? Like you don’t know that you’re missing benefits if you’re not actually using them, or don’t have an immediate need for them... But if you ask any employee if they feel differently about work or good about work when other people in the organization see what they’re doing and acknowledge that work, there’s not a human in the world who would say, nah, I don’t care about that."