20 people to know in human resources

A lite paper on what we learned in a room full of People to Know.

The Human Resources Edition

roomIn the

Julie Holbein Cardinal Health, Inc.

George KademenosVSP Vision Center, Eastern Operations Center

Anne KingMotorists Insurance Group

Kim Kocher Delphia Consulting, LLC

Ken Lazar McIntyre Global Executive Search

Kara Manz Jacobson Cos.

Lynn McNabb City of Whitehall

Jamey Miller Walmart Logistics

Tessa Pekarcik Germain Motor, Co.

Chris RutterCallCopy Inc.

Nicole Smith Trustaff

Fran Wahrman Huntington National Bank

Scott Warrick Scott Warrick Consulting & Employment Law Services

Fran Watkins CareWorks Family of Companies

Monica YanscikNational Registry of EMTs

The People to Know‘In the Room’ Initiative

At Clark Schaefer Hackett, we’re proud to be industry specialists. We strive to know everything we can about the industries we serve, and to share that insight for the good of our clients and communities. When we gathered the 2013 Human Resources People to Know around one table to talk, we were privy to profound thought, unique perspectives, and intelligent understanding. Here, we share their wisdom with you.

Unexpected ways that healthcare benefits shape the labor force

Swaying workforce culture for their benefit and yours

The altered, social world of recruiting and retention

What we learned

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Unexpected ways that healthcare benefits shape the labor force

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The country’s healthcare industry is in a state of transition and the American workforce is well aware of it. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) alters the employee benefit landscape by mandating that employers make significant healthcare decisions this year, and also establishes new marketplaces for healthcare coverage called exchanges.

The history of rising healthcare costs threatens employers’ ability to continue to offer attractive benefits. And the U.S. healthcare delivery system has found itself stressed.

That leaves Human Resource professionals to thoughtfully navigate an uncertain environment that impacts recruiting, retention, and productivity. HR professionals are on the frontline of identifying and responding to workforce shifts and trends.

When it comes to competing for talent, you want to have a great benefits package. So my organization is not changing the healthcare coverage we offer our associates, even in the wake of the ACA. Benefits are an important aspect of recruiting, so we can’t leave it to chance. We don’t know how the exchanges are going to look, and what the benefits are going to be.

A lot of my clients are working hard in this economy to recruit top talent. And I can tell you that there are employers using the existence of the ACA like a bargaining chip when they try to make their employment opportunity attractive to a candidate. They are positioning their own company’s healthcare benefits package as an advantage, compared to competing companies who may send their workforce to the exchanges.

Insight from roundtable participants...

Julie Holbein Cardinal Health, Inc.

ScottWarrickScott Warrick Consulting & Employment Law Services

You’re not going to attract talent when you can’t say, “Here is what we are offering,” and right now it’s unclear what the federal and state exchanges will be offering. Employers that are unsure of their benefits just can’t be competitive. If a candidate has a choice between going to a large organization that clearly communicates its benefits package, and coming to an entrepreneur with 45 employees who will be utilizing exchange benefits, they will choose clarity. It’s going to be tough to hire for a while.

My company also intends to maintain its healthcare coverage for our associates. But having said that, we’ve taken a good look at this legislation and we have some concerns. First, it looks clear we’ll incur more expense, particularly due to the legislation’s $63 fee for each member - not just for each associate - which is significant. We’re also concerned for our employees now that more people in the general population are going to have access to insurance. The fear is that this change in the healthcare market will limit our employees’ access to physicians, affecting their care and overall health. We also think the legislation will shift our employee population. We anticipate more early retirees, because they’re going to have other options now. They don’t have to wait until becoming eligible for Medicare.



Anne KingMotorists Insurance Group

Kim KocherDelphia Consulting, LLC

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I think it’s legitimate to wonder about the quality of care the healthcare system is going to be able to offer employees going forward. I work in healthcare, and there is a concern from the industry - doctors, large hospitals, acute care facilities - about the volume of people that will suddenly be in a healthcare delivery system that already lacks efficiency. So there is a big concern about quality, efficiency, and access to care because so many people will be added into the system. It needs help.

I’ve seen that the ACA legislation is changing how some employers anticipate staffing positions. There are organizations that will be forced to consider limiting the hours of part-timers, likely hiring a greater number of individuals at lower hours, to avoid the expense of enrolling them in healthcare coverage. It will result in under-employment for people who would’ve been offered more hours under other circumstances. Of course, perhaps you could argue it provides a greater number of people with at least partial employment. But for those individuals who aren’t getting as many hours as they might have, that’s not a good thing in my estimation.


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Lynn McNabbCity of Whitehall

Julie HolbeinCardinal Health, Inc.




Scott WarrickScott Warrick Consulting & Employment Law Services

You can be creative in the benefits you offer in order to make them appealing. When we were forced to raise our deductible we knew that wouldn’t be an attractive change. But we put an HRA in our plan in order to reimburse employees when anything hit their deductible. So it actually became a zero deductible plan once we implemented the HRA. And it meant the world to our employees. Interestingly, at the end of year it became clear we only used about 38% of what we had budgeted for that HRA reimbursement.

I’m seeing that the general labor force is already behaving in reaction to trends in healthcare benefits. I work for a municipality and people are knocking down our doors for employment because of the perceived stability and high level of benefits in the public sector. We can look back to a time when individuals focused more on salary. Now it seems they’re willing to forgo that high compensation for strong, reliable benefits.

Compensation - salary and benefits together - is a financial issue, but its’ also an emotional issue for that person you are trying to recruit. I mean, for some people there’s a high level of fear surrounding healthcare. If you are over 40, if you have a serious condition in the family, if you have kids, or God help you if you have a kid with special needs, these benefits trump everything else. The healthcare benefit makes a big difference in the decision to take one job over another.

Monica YanscikNational Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians

Effecting workplace change that employers and employees appreciate

As providers of healthcare insurance benefits, today’s employers find themselves walking a delicate balance. They must consider their desire to shed burdensome coverage costs against their need to attract and retain talent.

Human Resource executives stand at the crossroads of these competing wishes, managing to find strategies that simultaneously reduce healthcare costs while increasing employee satisfaction. By offering attractive, cost-reducing plan options like high-deductible HSA plans, as well as wellness programs that encourage the heath improvement of the entire workforce, HR addresses both business goals.

But the greatest challenge is engaging employees to support these efforts. Successful methods that create a culture of engagement are sought after and replicated.

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We’ve been promoting high deductible health plans for the last three years, and more people are moving to that. But others can’t quite get over their fear of the unknown, and of the possibility of incurring a high medical cost. So they’ll sign up for managed care plans like a preferred provider organization (PPO) plan or a health maintenance organization (HMO) plan. So we have to work to educate about that.

Huntington Bank has a strong wellness program that, as of January 1st, includes a tobacco-free hiring policy in states where it is permitted. The policy aligns well with our focus on total health and is strongly supported by our senior leadership. While employees who were in place prior to the tobacco-free hiring policy are not held to the same tobacco-free expectation, we do provide strong incentives for employees to stop tobacco use by offering nicotine cessation programs and a medical premium discount to non-tobacco users.


George KademenosVSP Vision Center, Eastern Operations Center

Fran WahrmanHuntington National Bank

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We now offer three different PPO plans and a high deductible plan with an HSA. We’ve priced them appropriately, so the HSA is a pretty clear value. If people want that 90% plan for instance, they need to understand that they are going to have to pay for it. And we educate our workforce about the benefits the HSA offers the employee. We’ve probably sounded like an advertisement; we were pushing people so clearly toward the HSA. But we feel strongly about its benefits. We especially try to emphasize that annual visits to the doctor are covered. And when I have personal conversations with others, I acknowledge that no one can decide what’s right for their family except them. But I also share my family’s own experience with the HSA plan – which is an annual savings of about $4,000 compared to if we’d had a PPO – to demonstrate how the math might work out to their advantage. And we go over the plan’s maximum out-of-pocket expense to address that worst-case-scenario concern, the worry that they are going to have an unexpected, terrible occurrence that results in a $100,000 claim. Education is so important because people need all the facts to make the best decision.

Educating employees about healthcare coverage is so important and so challenging. It has never been easy to communicate to the workforce what’s in their plan, how it works, and how it impacts them. Now the message is more complex because they must understand and evaluate high deductible plans versus managed care plans. And when you think about what is going to be next – the need to convey how the ACA will impact healthcare coverage - it will be really challenging.


Fran WatkinsCareWorks Family of Companies

Tessa PekarcikGermain Motor, Co.

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I have also been part of putting together a high deductible health plan. When we first implemented it, we continued to offer the PPO as well as the high deductible health plan, and we just educated that first year. We had just a few people take it. And after they enrolled in it, and saw the cost difference and its association with an HSA, they were pleased with their choice. So they started doing word-of-mouth education and promotion. By the second year, we had over 50% of our employees on that plan. And it has continued to grow.

We’ve completely dropped the availability of a PPO plan. But when we did, we gave every employee five extra paid time off (PTO) days. On another occasion when we were forced to drop a particular aspect of our medical coverage, the company took over the employees’ total premium payments for dental and vision, we jacked up our contribution on life insurance, we gave them five more PTO days, and we added a floating holiday. So we couldn’t give them back the medical benefit we had to stop offering, but we tried to give them something else of value in its place.

If you want to attract good talent, you need to offer personal development and a culture of wellness, in addition to a foundation of competitive compensation and desirable benefits. It’s part of that total package that you present when you are recruiting. We all know that wellness is a tool to lower premium costs; we have to remember that it also creates a desirable workplace. And to have a healthy culture, you can’t just offer a program. You truly have to foster a mindset.


Julie HolbeinCardinal Helath, Inc.



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And I’m not sure the industry has been honest about how we use and promote health and wellness programs. When we use the term “health and wellness” maybe we fail to properly communicate how much employee’s choices affect our health coverage costs. Employees see their rates go up, and they seem to feel that the company shouldn’t be passing those costs on to them. Education should be our top priority, teaching employees how their behavior can control our cost, and explaining how that will help their cost.

For last year’s open enrollment period, our company enacted a new policy that required a preventative physical in order to get the lower wellness premium rates. Without the physical, the employee’s rates would go up. Many members of my workforce will not go to the doctor unless they really have to, so these exams were valuable. Through those physicals our workforce discovered all kinds of conditions and indications of health risk. Physicians diagnosed issues, detected risk factors, and discussed prevention, which are all proven to “nip conditions in the bud” and drive down the future costs for your plan.

When the over-age dependent requirements went into effect, we added approximately 40 additional dependents. It was a nearly 10% increase and that’s a large group to add. And it’s difficult to encourage this group toward healthier lifestyles, so they add greater risk to our pool. “Wellness” is the warm, fuzzy word that we use to describe our health encouraging programs. It’s an appropriate word because it communicates that we care about employees’ well being, which is certainly true. But these programs are also part of risk management, identifying potential liabilities and enacting strategies to negate them.



Kara ManzJacobson Companies

Jamey MillerWalmart Logistics

Because of some major claims made by family members of our employees in the past, we’ve been forced to acknowledge how little we can influence the wellness of dependents. We’ve slowly shifted our pricing structure so that we basically pay a flat rate per employee, toward whatever coverage they choose, whether they take single, or family, or family with kids. In essence, employees pay for their additional covered family members almost entirely on their own.

When you’re encouraging wellness you can’t stop with the employee. You also have to engage the entire family too. They affect your premiums just as much as the associate.

For our employees we have an onsite wellness center and we offer biometric screening. We also offer an annual health assessment that impacts the premium our employees pay. It’s offered to spouses too, and there’s a monetary incentive for them to complete it. Based on responses, the assessment program will suggest some things you might need to work on, and will offer the option of a free session with a health coach.

In my organization we have a tobacco discouraging policy that applies to both employees and spouses. We structure our plans with higher premium rates for tobacco users. There are two different rates, depending on the tobacco use of one or both spouses, and we rely the honor system for reporting that. We also offer tobacco cessation support, such as free patches, gum, lozenges.






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It’s easy to engage the already-healthy population in your wellness programs. But those aren’t the people who are causing your healthcare costs to go up. The problem lies in encouraging the people who would really benefit from the programs. So you have to incentivize. Success lies in education, and reward. You can’t just offer employees a 10% discount on gym memberships and expect change. Employers need to look outside the box a little bit.

We just launched an employee wellness center, which is rare in the public sector. But it’s a response to our healthcare costs, which we had to start curtailing. So we now offer completely free services to employees who go to these centers. The services are health and wellness based, including nutritional counseling, disease management programs, free pharmaceuticals, free diabetic testing supplies, and free evaluations. The medical team is truly attempting to create ongoing relationships with our employees. Part of the benefit to us is the transparency of the cost. We’re paying a medical team a per-hour fee, whether they see ten people or one person in that timeframe. It’s projected to be less expensive than paying physician fees, per visit, to other providers. Also, when employees fill generic prescriptions there, it will be much less expensive to us than when they have them filled at a pharmacy. So this is an attempt to creatively provide a benefit while recognizing cost savings.



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The social world of recruiting and retention

When it comes to recruiting needed talent, the Human Resource profession realizes the need to “fish where the fish are.”

From the executives who keep an updated resume-like profile on LinkedIn, to the Millennials who traffic Facebook and keep current through Twitter feeds, the engaged, plugged-in worker is a social media user.

Society’s collective comfort level with these tools affects both recruiting and retention. For a profession honed on protecting and respecting employee privacy, this is a world fraught with as many challenges as opportunities.

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Social media has impacted HR more than anything else in the last 20 years. It has raised issues for both recruiting and employee relations.

We’re on LinkedIn and we lead LinkedIn groups, we have websites, we’re on Facebook, and we’re always looking for talent. We might post on our Twitter LinkedIn account “really busy this afternoon, looking for a front end developer.” And then we’ll feed off of that when they hit either Facebook or one of our websites. It’s been years since we’ve used more traditional tools like an ad or a recruiter. The last 5 people we found were passive hires. They were all done exclusively through social media.

Human resource professionals who aren’t on board with social media are going to be left behind, especially when it comes to recruiting Gen Y’s. It’s such an integral part of their existence.

All of my recruiting efforts include social media. It’s a critical tool because you can identify and attract people who aren’t even looking for a career change. That’s a huge population of people that are definitely wanted because they are current and relevant in their profession. From LinkedIn or Twitter, I’ll post things, and refer them to our website. I’ll be honest; it has helped my business tremendously. I also suggest targeting second connections on LinkedIn.


Nicole SmithTrustaff


Fran WatkinsCareWorks Family of Companies


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I’ve had a lot of success with using Facebook to lure people into my website, where they can apply online. Twitter has been huge. We tweet about the benefits of working for our company. We just encourage them to check us out. That has probably been responsible for 80 percent of how we’re getting our candidates in, the other 20 percent is through actively searching on LinkedIn.

I’m not a huge proponent of doing any direct recruiting through Facebook , except to post things, and refer people to our website. As far as looking for candidates on Facebook the way we do on LinkedIn, it’s just not effective. I think it can create biases up front, and that’s not helpful.

I’m also wary of viewing candidates’ Facebook pages. You want to protect yourself from accusations of bias. We’re all curious about who they are, and if they would be a good fit in the company. But that might not be the best avenue for answers.


ChrisRutterCallCopy Inc.


I’d bet that when most HR professionals receive blind inquiries into a job, we all look for their LinkedIn profile as part of our research. Just to see, what do they care about and how do they present themselves? Candidates who are members of Gen X and Gen Y are very sensitive to the brand of a company they are considering. Well I want to see what their brand is, and that includes their photo and interests.

I schedule introductory meetings with people out of the office, and I nearly always look at their LinkedIn photo so I can recognize them. And I do see their profile as their personal brand. I’ll be honest; right now I’m doing tons of interviews. And it blows my mind how many people have neglected to create a LinkedIn profile, or, worse yet, they have a half of one. And they’re looking to make a change? Really? Your LinkedIn profile is the very first thing you need to get in order.

It’s important that everybody has a very robust LinkedIn profile. You have to get your brand out there and make it visible. Be sure what you have on LinkedIn is what you want the world to see. Because even though it’s not a resume, it is a valuable document. Today it’s possible to be introduced to an employer, go through an interview and receive an offer, and then be asked to submit a resume for the files as a mere formality. People are being recruited solely on the basis of their LinkedIn profiles.




Ken LazarMcIntyre Global Executive Search



By putting very specific search terms and Boolean into LinkedIn, I can find just the perfect fit for an open position. That’s what you want, people who aren’t looking.

LinkedIn is a real blessing for finding and actively recruiting qualified candidates. But it can be a challenge to employee retention. That’s because the other side of the coin is that employers are vulnerable to losing great employees. When you employ a really strong, talented individual, everybody now knows about it by reading it on their LinkedIn profile ... those wonderful skills, expertise, and recommendations are all out there for anyone to see. Recruiters have an easier time finding them now, so you can’t feel safe that your best employees are never going to leave.

Social media can also have a place inside your organization, and innovative tools like that can affect retention. We’ve created an internal Facebook-like site called Engage. It has the same purpose as any social media, which is to connect people. As a company, you want that for your employees. We have over 3,000 people in Dublin, but our organization is so matrixed, it’s difficult to know people you don’t work with directly. So you can connect on Engage. It helps people keep in touch, and it promotes our culture. It’s pretty cool.

We allow and encourage using social media at our company. It’s a part of our workplace culture, and there is something to be said for that when it comes to retention. We’re a little different because we’re an IT firm, but a lot of companies have embraced this idea. They feel like employees are going to be on it anyhow, and they won’t spend any more time on it because it’s approved as opposed to hidden.


Fran WahrmanHuntington National Bank


Kara ManzJacobson Companies

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