WorkLife Productions, Inc. News
Employee
Surveys now available from WorkLife Productions, Inc.
Employee surveys are the lifeblood of managing your human resources. Without the feedback of employee surveys you are completely out of touch with the real wants and needs of your employees. An effectively constructed and administered anonymous survey will give you crucial information to use in developing new or fine-tuning existing programs. Using the Internet, we can reduce the cost of employee surveys and speed up the turnaround time.
WorkLife
Productions nominated for the Working Woman Entrepreneurial Excellence Award
2000
Jane Angelich, President of WorkLife Productions, Inc., received a certificate from Working Woman magazine saluting WorkLife Productions as a nominee of the Working Woman Entrepreurial Excellence Awards 2000 for its "commitment to business excellence and leadership."
(Posted 2/00)
Work-Life
benefits featured in newly released Compensation Handbook
James F. Kisela, CEO of WorkLife Productions, Inc., is the author of a chapter entitled " The Role of Work-Life Benefits in the Total Pay Strategy" in the newly released Compensation Handbook: A State-of-the-Art Guide to Compensation Strategy and Design by Lance and Dorothy Berger, published by McGraw-Hill. Mr. Kisela is also a member of the faculty at the University of Phoenix (Philadelphia Campus).
(Posted 2/00)
WorkLife Productions booth at Working Mother Work/Family Congress
Thanks to all those of you who visited our booth featuring the WorkLife ToolKit® during the third annual Work/Family Congress sponsored by Working Mother magazine September 22-24 in New York City at the Marriott Marquis hotel. Jane Angelich, Jim McCann, Oliver Mann, and Francine Port were on hand to meet and greet the great many visitors to the booth..
The WorkLife ToolKit® and The WorkLife University® trademarks officially registered
On July 6, 1999 the United States Patent and Trademark Office offically registered the WorkLife ToolKit® and The WorkLife University® trademarks.
Jane Angelich, President of WorkLife Productions, Inc. Interviewed by the Star-Ledger
Dory Devlin, staff writer for the Star-Ledger, recently interviewed Jane Angelich, President of WorkLife Productions, Inc.and other experts in the work-life consulting field for a column on the importance of calculating the return-on-inves®ent for work-life programs.
|
In her two decades tracking corporate work-life policies, Dana Friedman has found the more resistant a company's top management to introducing work-life initiatives, the more data requested to prove a return on the inves®ent. Return on inves®ent is a hot topic. Every company wants to know how it benefits by being family-friendly, but not every company knows. Even the ones that offer an impressive list of programs often are clueless. When Bright Horizons Family Solutions and William M. Mercer Inc. surveyed 400 companies last year, only 40 percent had taken a look at their work-life programs to see if they were successful, says Friedman, senior vice president at Bright Horizons Family Solutions and author of the benchmark study. It's not that it's impossible to add up the costs and benefits. But math only gets you so far. Subjective judgments cannot be avoided when dissecting the reasons for absenteeism or attempting to gauge employee morale, productivity and loyalty. "A real return on inves®ent analysis is one that holds everything else constant," Friedman says. "That's a joke in the business world today." Even a top-notch child-care center, a well-utilized resource and referral service or flexible scheduling will not sharply reduce employee stress and turnover if there is rampant fear of layoffs or rumors of a merger. The best evaluations rely heavily on anonymous employee surveys, which require employees to feel comfortable enough to tell the truth. "Surveys are the key," says Jane Angelich, president of WorkLife Productions, a work-life software and consulting company. The good news, says Angelich, is work-life surveys get a tremendous response -- always more than 50 percent, compared to about 5 percent for other kinds of questionnaires. When Angelich, who headed human resources at Salomon Brothers in New York for a decade, designed software to help employees set up or improve work-life programs, she put the primary emphasis on return on inves®ent (ROI). "After 10 years of working on Wall Street, constantly being challenged to quantify everything and defend all of my programs, I said if I started my own business I would come at it from the financial side first." Her company's $795 "WorkLife ToolKit" includes a financial modeling tool that allows a company to plug in data from employee surveys, including days absent because of family conflicts and time spent on the office phone to set up child care and elder care arrangements. After loading in average salary and benefits figures for management and hourly workers, the software runs the numbers that give the company a ballpark idea of the hidden costs of ignoring work-life pressures. "It's a starting point," Angelich says. "Once you have that piece of info, then you're in a more able position to determine what kinds of work-life programs are best suited for your population." Companies need to look at utilization of their programs, too, she says. Promoting a list of work-life policies in the media but not communicating them at the office is pointless. "The only way to get that return on inves®ent in a program is to have the people use the program," Angelich says. There's no standard in the work-life industry on how to measure utilization, says Nila Betof, vice president of organizational services and strategic planning for Ceridian Performance Partners in Minneapolis. "A lot of these numbers are on the softer side," she says. Still, when Ceridian follows up on work-life programs with employee surveys, its clients report anywhere from an 8-to-1 return on inves®ent. ROI studies are built into Ceridian's service costs, which Betof estimates at between $1 to $2 a month per employee. Turnover costs also are calculated: The rule of thumb is it costs one and a half times a typical manager's salary to replace her. "What isn't taken into account in an ROI study is what attracts people," Betof says. HR News, a Society of Human Resources publication, reported that 45 percent of students coming out of school into the work force are looking for employers who understand the need for balance between work and life. And, generally, these are prospective employees who don't have children yet. When Johnson & Johnson launched its full slate of work-life programs in July 1989, the New Brunswick-based company had the unique opportunity to compare employee satisfaction before and after. "Employees told us those who used the programs and policies were less stressed, experienced less negative spillover from jobs to family lives, felt more successful in balancing work and family responsibilities and were more loyal to the company," says Chris Kjeldsen, J&J's vice president of community and workplace programs. Through the surveys, the company discovered it needed work-life training for supervisors to make it clear the programs were there to be used. The company tried to look at absenteeism and tardiness, but found they were hard to connect to work-life policies. But it didn't matter. "We just knew," says Kjeldsen. "Intuitively, we knew from the beginning that to get the best out of all the employees who made us the business we are today, we knew this was the right thing to do."
Star-Ledger 04/19/99 By Dory Devlin Star-Ledger Staff Writer |
Jim McCann, Executive Vice President of WorkLife Productions, Inc. presenting at 1999 Foreign Bank Forum
On Wednesday, February 10, 1999, Jim McCann, Vice President of WorkLife Productions, Inc.made a presentation entitled Work/Life Programs as a Business Issue at the Foreign Bank Forum in New York city.
|
Summary In order to compete for talent and prepare for the global economy of the 21st Century, employers must offer practical benefit solutions. These solutions must adress the needs of a changing workforce and help employees balance both their professional and personal goals. Recent studies have shown that programs and policies that address employees' work-life issues have significant value in improving employee commi®ent, decreasing turnover and assisting in recrui®ent. This presentation is designed to demonstrate how specific work-life programs can be strategically assessed and implemented as a tool to improve the bottom-line. |
Jane Angelich, President of WorkLife Productions, Inc. presented at 1998 ITAC conference
On Tuesday, October 27, 1998, Jane Angelich, President of WorkLife Productions, Inc. made a presentation entitled Work/Life Alternatives at the 1998 ITAC (International Telework Association & Council) conference: Redefining the Workplace for the Information Age.
Jane Angelich, President of WorkLife Productions, Inc. presentation at 1998 Work/Family Congress
On Wednesday, September 16, 1998, Jane Angelich, President of WorkLife Productions, Inc., presented a pre-conference nuts and bolts workshop entitled How to Launch a Work/Life Program in Your Company -- a Primer for Successat Working Mothermagazine's 1998 Work/Family Congress.
|
Summary
Utilizing case studies, group discussions and work/life software, you will develop the business tools necessary to set -up and launch a successful work/life program. Learn how to review your company's current work/life program, how to compare it to the competition and how it compares to the nation's "best" employers. Quantify the hidden work/life costs of doing nothing and find out how to measure the financial impact of specific initiatives such as flextime, telecommuting, information and referral, elder care, backup/emergency child care, and company-sponsored child care centers. Create a strategic work/life plan; learn how to present it to senior-management and how to design a communications campaign to achieve the buy-in you need from employees and managers. Engage in discussion and develop usable skills in the following topic areas:
|
World Wide Web Site Established
August 10, 1998, we established our world wide web site at www.worklifepro.com and had our first visitors. This site will evolve as a combination of free information and special areas only open to clients, as a supplement to their use of the WorkLife ToolKit® CD-ROM.
Joint Venture to Deliver the WorkLife University®
In early 1998, MacDonald Publications, Inc. publishers of Working Mothermagazine and WLP formed a joint venture to deliver the WLU as a two day certification program to be presented at sites across the country (see the WorkLife University section for dates and locations).
New Product Award
In December, 1997, Human Resource Executive magazine named the WorkLife ToolKit® one of the top 10 new products of 1997. This was the first time in the history of this award that a work-life product was selected.
The review concluded: "The WorkLife ToolKit’s user-friendly cost calculating and ROI features can quickly provide HR with the hard numbers they need for justifying a work/life program and estimating its cost. The ToolKit’s library is comprehensive, as is the list of sources, which includes addresses and phone numbers. Best of all, the program is a snap to install and use." Go see the WorkLife ToolKit®.
Calendar of events, meetings, and conferences
Stay up-to-date in the field and come see us either as speakers or in our booth. For a calendar of events, meetings, conferences, and other happenings go to our calendar section.