Archive for employment
Don’t wind up on the least-wanted list
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Yes, kids, it’s that time of year again.
ChristmaHanaKwanzaKah is once again in the hearts and on the minds of everyone from sea to shining sea – and beyond – so it’s time for a remedial lesson on How to Succeed in Business Without Really Lying.
Here are the Mighty Casey Media rules for surviving the holidays with your sanity – and your client list – intact:
- Don’t be a grinch. If you’re not a big fan of the holidays, don’t trash those who are. You don’t have to go overboard and wear a pair of reindeer antlers all month, yet neither do you have to tell the office Christmas Elf that s/he is crazy for loving the holidays.
- Be a gracious guest. If you’re invited to a holiday celebration by a client or a colleague, accept with thanks. Attend with intent to find the cheer. Bring a friend along who could be a good prospect for the business. Holiday gifts can come in the form of customers. Take it from one who knows.
- Be a thoughtful host. If you host a holiday gathering, make sure to keep the conversation and connection flowing. Configure your party so there’s plenty of opportunity to interact, and make the rounds continually to ensure that everyone is enjoying themselves. And have a defined end-time for the party, which saves having to shovel folks out the door.
- If you can’t deal, deal yourself out. If the holidays drive you nuts, that seems like a great excuse to take off on a vacation, a retreat, or a sabbatical. Deal yourself out of the holiday merry-go-round, and return to the game refreshed after Santa’s blown town.
Merry ChristmaHanaKwanzaKah to all, and to all a way to make the end-of-year insanity work for you!
Why is business expected to pay for healthcare in the US?
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve asked this question frequently over the years, starting in the ’80s, continuing to today … and I’ll keep it up until someone realizes that it’s a failed paradigm.
What we have here, kidz, is what happens when a society decides that socialism is anathema, but doesn’t empower and educate its citizens about how to take responsibility for themselves in ways that will keep them healthy, productive community members.
Business started picking up the tab for healthcare during World War II, when stiff wage controls made it impossible for defense plants to give their employees raises. In place of more money, they started to pay for health insurance – which state and federal government were more than happy to turn into mandated employee benefits over the next 20 years.
What happened then was predictable: three generations have been out of touch with the true cost of healthcare, and the true cost of their choices about their health. If you’re a good little American consumer, you do whatever your television tells you to do: eat this. Buy that. Otherwise the terrorists win!
Three generations of disconnection from the real costs of our medical care have delivered us an epidemic of obesity – thanks to plentiful empty calories, courtesy of agri-business, and our willingness to beach ourselves on our sofas, in our SUVs, or at our computers, the better to receive more messages about what we should buy and eat.
Health insurance costs have skyrocketed as we’ve become a nation of couch potatoes. Companies are scaling back their employee health benefits as those costs continue to rise, putting more and more people in the un-insured or under-insured bucket.
Here’s a suggestion: sell health insurance like auto, home, and life insurance are sold. Put consumers in charge of shopping for, and purchasing, their own insurance. Let business help their employees, if they choose to do so, as a true benefit rather than a mandate. Help every consumer set up a Health Savings Account for their healthcare expenses. And stop the state-by-state divvy-up that lets health insurers essentially gerrymander the health insurance marketplace.
Put consumers fully in charge of their insurance, and their care. Turn the health insurance market into a car-insurance model. People can buy minimum levels of insurance, and assume the risk of that choice. They can opt out completely, and assume all the risk for their healthcare costs. Make it a true marketplace, rather than the giant mess that we currently call health insurance.
Radical? Perhaps. Necessary? I’d say it’s essential.
Until we’re put in touch with the costs of our healthcare, we won’t be encouraged/empowered to take control of our health. As long as we’re using other people’s money to pay for healthcare, we’re stuck where we are.
Which is a very bad place to be.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it …
How far would you go for medical treatment?
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No, not how far you’d go in the Denzel Washington/John Q/hold-a-hospital-hostage sense. In the get-on-a-plane-toward-care sense.
Medical tourism has seen an exponential rise with patients in the US as health care costs and the number of uninsured patients have risen over the last 15 years. In a TIME magazine piece in 2006, Curtis Schroeder, CEO of Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok – somehow, I don’t think he’s Thai – said that in 2005 their census of US patients rose 30% (to 55,000).
That trend has continued, even with the advent of “health care reform” – health insurance reform, really – since health care costs have continued their hockey-stick rise, with no end in sight, for two decades.
50 years ago, patients from across the globe saw health care in the US as the holy grail. Now, US patients are traveling to Costa Rica, Thailand, Mexico, New Zealand, even Cuba to get access to high-quality, low-cost care.
US companies have started to explore medical tourism, and some are offering incentives to their employees – incentives including getting to pocket some of the savings gained from traveling abroad for treatment. Not enough, however, to make medical tourism a healthy industry here in the US of A.
An August 2011 article in Workforce Management includes a story about a nurse in Louisiana (irony is our favorite thing here at Mighty Casey Media) who traveled to Costa Rica a few years ago for dental work, including oral surgery. She paid $2,700 out of pocket for what would have cost her $10,000 at home, with her employer covering $1,500 of her care expenses. Her net cost for the procedures was $1,200, plus her travel expenses – which travel was negotiated and arranged by a broker, Companion Global Health Care Inc.
I’m sure that, even after travel expenses, her savings were still solidly in the thousands of dollars.
So why aren’t more US companies encouraging their employees to take advantage of medical tourism? According to the CEO of Companion Global, David Boucher – who certainly has a dog in this fight, and who is quoted in the Workforce Management article linked above – the rising costs of health care make the health-tourism choice a no-brainer. He says that their customers are seeing a 2- or 3-to-1 return on investment for medical tourism, and patients – their customers employees – are very satisfied with the quality of their care.
However, according to Joe Marlowe, senior VP of health and productivity at the risk-management and HR consulting firm Aon Hewitt who’s also quoted in the WM story, employers are risk-averse, particularly at the idea of making themselves liable for medical care far from home that turns out badly for the patient.
What do you think? Would you travel 8,000 miles for a knee replacement, or 3,000 for chemotherapy, to save a significant amount of money and still receive high-quality care? Or would you want to be closer to your support system – family, friends – while receiving care?
I would most certainly travel to Bangkok or San Jose for a knee replacement. Not sure about oncology, since that follow-up can be so long-term.
You? I really would like to know.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it …
SnagAJob.com – Helping People Find the Right Jobs & Companies Find the Right People
Posted by: | CommentsThis is the text from a press release the Greater Richmond Technology Council sent out today about their monthly breakfast this coming Friday – if you’re in the Richmond area, come hear what Shawn Boyer and Wei Wang have to say.
Richmond, VA. Aug. 6, 2007 – Eight
years ago, a friend asked Shawn Boyer, then a transactional attorney at Brown
& Wood LLP, to help him look for a summer internship online. When Boyer found very few sites listing
available internships, and almost no sites offering part-time or full-time
hourly jobs, he had the “a-ha” moment that led to founding SnagAJob.com, the
on-line hourly job board that now has more than 7 million registered
users. Mr. Boyer will tell the
SnagAJob.com story, and talk about the online recruiting industry, at the
Greater Richmond Technology Council (GRTC) Good Morning Technology breakfast on
Friday, August 10, 2007 at
The Place at Innsbrook. The breakfast
will start at 7:30am and end at 9:00am.
Mr. Boyer,
SnagAJob.com’s President & CEO, will give an overview of the company’s
services, as well as a history of online recruiting. SnagAJob.com is now the nation’s largest
hourly-wage job board, and in addition to racking up close to triple-digit
growth every year since 2000, the company has become the recruitment tool of
choice for a wide array of businesses, including Jiffy Lube and 7-Eleven.
Testimonials
from customers like Veronica Thomas, regional recruiter at Jiffy Lube, saying,
“We use SnagAJob.com because it works. It has proven to boost our applicant
flow by 50 percent. The customer service is in a class of its own,” are an
indication of why the company is successful. Customer service, ease of use, and quality of candidates make employers
happy customers – and those seeking work are equally complimentary about their
experiences with SnagAJob.com. One
job-seeker quoted on the company’s website is Miya E., who says that
SnagAJob.com is “the No. 1 source for hourly employment (and a
friend to the hourly worker).”
SnagAJob.com’s
Chief Technology Officer, Wei Wang, will join Mr. Boyer in addressing the GRTC
membership. Mr. Wang, who holds a
Masters in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from MIT, will talk
about the IT infrastructure initiatives the company has undertaken to manage
its success and rapid growth. Mr. Wang
recognizes the human side of SnagAJob.com’s business, “I
believe that people are our best asset, and my duty is to create a scalable
organization to maximize everyone’s potential and to allow each person to live
a more fulfilling life.” That sentiment
is echoed by each member of the company’s leadership team who, along with their
impressive array of degrees and business experience, list their first
hourly-wage jobs in their bios on the SnagAJob.com website.
The August GRTC
Good Morning Technology breakfast is sponsored by Monument Consulting, a
Richmond-based firm that delivers flexible and cost-effective recruiting
models, including recruiting process outsourcing. Monument Consulting helps its customers
recruit the great talent that is crucial to their business success.
The
Greater Richmond Technology Council is an association of businesses and
organizations working together to promote the success of technology companies,
and the growth of the technology sector of the Central Virginia economy.
The Story on the Whole Jobs Thing (at Least AFAIC…)
Posted by: Mighty Casey | Comments (0)Jobs numbers have, to quote Forbes Magazine, fallen “off the table”.
Everyone knows at least a dozen people who are un-, or at least under, employed. And several more who are decidedly nervous about their continued employment.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking for quite a long time now: jobs are dead. Long live daily individual value delivery.
This is a multi-channel challenge. I can hear the benefits administrators of the world saying, “oh, HELL no!”
I can hear the education system, in this country and many others, protesting that they’re teaching to the test already (pumping out potential employees), and if they have to start teaching critical thinking again…well, things could get ugly.
I can hear the legions of job-holders around the world winding up their best roundhouse kick to knock my block off.
Change happens. If you’ve been on the employee train for a long time, trying to wrap your mind around not finding another job when you lose the one you’ve got can be downright scary. Just ask Paul Nawrocki, who lost his in February 2008 when the toy company he worked for went under.
Nawrocki has become both internet, and news-network, famous, thanks to his self-propelled mobile advertising (f/k/a “sandwich board”) – what a great opportunity to recast himself as a buzz marketer!
I’m kidding. But not really.
What times like the present call for is a change in thinking, for all of us.
The job may not be dead, but it is on life support. Start thinking like a consultant, a freelancer, a solopreneur, even if you toil alongside thousands of co-workers at a Fortune 100.
If you don’t bring it – “it”, in this instance, being that daily value delivery I mentioned above – the out-of-work sword will constantly dangle just above your cranium.
Don’t hug that job. It’s unlikely to hug you back for very long, and it’s highly likely to be unfaithful.
And don’t ever neglect your daily value delivery requirement.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it….