Workforce Management
Alight Solutions | January 09, 2024
Alight, Inc. a leading cloud-based human capital and technology services provider, and CirrusMD, a physician-first provider of on-demand virtual care, today announced a strategic agreement to offer a chat-enabled, physician-led, virtual care solution. The partnership is aimed at breaking down barriers to virtual care by providing employees with access to expert physicians across a wide range of health care needs on the Alight Worklife platform.
“The Alight Worklife platform serves as employees’ comprehensive connection point to their health, wealth, payroll and leaves benefits, which helps employers cut complexities, costs and engage individuals in the moments that matter most,” said Bipin Mistry, chief medical officer at Alight. “The partnership with CirrusMD helps take employee engagement one step further by making physician-led virtual care easily accessible to employees and bridges the gap between virtual clinical care delivery and employer-sponsored benefits navigation.”
Helping employees arrive at the most appropriate care
Employees on the Alight Worklife platform can engage directly with CirrusMD or be prompted to engage after completing Alight’s AI-powered Symptom Checker online experience to better understand their healthcare needs and guide them to care options, including virtual care provided by CirrusMD. With Single Sign-On (SSO) for fast connections to care within 60 seconds, Alight Worklife enhances the participant experience.
CirrusMD’s Physician-first Care & Guidance approach to virtual primary care provides members with always-on, instant access to a doctor via chat-first modality. CirrusMD’s multidisciplinary clinical team conducts encounters on a proprietary clinical intelligence engine that provides real-time insights to physicians based on data from millions of patient-physician interactions. Once employees connect with physicians, CirrusMD offers a seamless, efficient and patient-centric virtual care experience by
Connecting patients to physicians in less than a minute, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year,
Delivering advanced primary care that includes behavioral health, women’s health, acute care, chronic condition management and more,
Physician-led seven-day experiences, interactions that allow time for in-depth diagnosis and treatment, reducing the high costs associated with multiple follow-ups,
Text-based chat with options for video, voice and images when needed,
Immediate referrals to employer benefits and in-network resources,
And real-time Spanish language translation to help overcome potential language barriers. Optimizing the integration of healthcare benefits and clinical workflows
The strategic partnership enables employers to select CirrusMD as part of their Alight Healthcare Navigation offering within the Alight Worklife platform. As well, CirrusMD providers benefit from access to Alight’s Symptom Checker results and can reference benefit programs available to the participant which can serve to facilitate patient follow-ups with both CirrusMD care teams and Alight Health Pros for a comprehensive healthcare journey support.
This combined solution provides ongoing navigation to appropriate referrals and resources. For example, Alight's support for individuals with Behavioral Health conditions aligns seamlessly with CirrusMD, offering quick access to virtual Behavioral Health support when needed. Employees can be directed to other types of care options such as virtual physical therapy, through referrals made directly from CirrusMD or Alight.
“At CirrusMD we are reimagining the point of care to provide the time and information needed to support a productive dialog between patient and physician, giving both the time and information they need for exceptional care experiences,” said Jamie Hall, president and CEO of CirrusMD. “This strategic agreement represents an important milestone in advancing virtual primary care, combining the strengths of Alight Solutions and CirrusMD to transform the healthcare experience for individuals and employers alike.”
CirrusMD boasts an 83% issue resolution rate and an 93% overall patient satisfaction rate, and serves notable customers including health plans, large employers and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
About Alight Solutions
Alight is a leading cloud-based human capital technology and services provider that powers confident health, wealth and wellbeing decisions for 36 million people and dependents. Our Alight Worklife® platform combines data and analytics with a simple, seamless user experience. Supported by our global delivery capabilities, Alight Worklife is transforming the employee experience for people around the world. With personalized, data-driven health, wealth, pay and wellbeing insights, Alight brings people the security of better outcomes and peace of mind throughout life’s big moments and most important decisions.
About CirrusMD
CirrusMD delivers Physician-first Care & Guidance, a smart care model founded in the tenets of Advanced Primary Care. It brings together activated members with trusted physicians, relevant resources, and smart technology to change healthcare as we know it. CirrusMD improves speed to care, removes barriers to physicians, brings patient data into the care encounter, and promotes transparency at the point of referral. We believe that when you provide immediate, affordable care at scale you can drive the change needed to improve health and lower cost across an entire population.
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Workforce Management
Ceridian | January 11, 2024
Ceridian a global leader in human capital management (HCM) technology, announced its upcoming retail product innovations, which highlight the company’s growing momentum in the sector. As the only solution that offers workforce management (WFM) and global payroll capabilities on a single platform, Dayforce – Ceridian’s industry-leading cloud software – helps retailers and the hospitality industry empower and retain frontline workers, increase operational agility when making staffing decisions, and enhance the employee experience.
Ceridian helps more than 1,280 retailers around the world optimize their workforce and improve employee engagement, attraction, and retention, including American Dream, Buehler’s Fresh Foods, Costa Coffee, Sobeys, and SPARC Group LLC, which owns and operates leading retail brands including but not limited to Aeropostale, Brooks Brothers, Forever 21, and Reebok.
“Today’s employees expect a personalized experience. Ceridian is an innovative, collaborative partner that is helping us shape the employee experience of the future,” said Julia Knox, Chief Technology & Analytics Officer, Sobeys.
"Forward-thinking retail and hospitality organizations need to embrace modern technologies, like machine learning and real-time workforce intelligence, to tackle the staffing and compliance challenges their industries face,” said Jack Bennett, Vice President and Retail Solutions Advisory Lead, Ceridian. “Coupled with Dayforce Wallet, our award-winning, on-demand pay solution, Dayforce is a single holistic platform for workforce management, pay, and talent that unlocks quantifiable value and gives retail and hospitality leaders an edge to better compete - and win - with today's boundless workforce."
Dayforce workforce management empowers frontline employees through schedule flexibility and a consumer-like experience, while driving agile retail operations by giving real-time workforce intelligence to managers. Continued enhancements include
Forecasting Powered by Machine Learning: In an ever-changing economic landscape, retailers can reduce costs and improve productivity by leveraging the power of machine learning (ML) in its labor planning. Dayforce ML forecasting helps managers make better decisions and optimize workforce allocation by forecasting future labor requirements down to 15-minute increments and become more precise over time.
Shift Marketplace: Modern workforce management provides organizations and employees with a simple, intuitive way of allowing stores and locations to share their workforce across their organization. With Shift Marketplace, employees can take on unfilled shifts at any location they choose, giving employees the flexibility to meet their financial goals while allowing managers to fill their labor demand needs without incurring additional costs to bring in outside resources.
Next-Generation Labor Planning: With Dayforce, customers can bring finance and operations together during the budget and planning processes to ensure forecasting and scheduling align with corporate targets. This process is further enhanced through scalable data models, a unified experience for long- and short-term planning, and yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily workforce insights that can drill down to zone and position levels.
Reimagined Time Experience: The Dayforce platform is improving the employee time experience with a human-centric user experience that prioritizes simpler workflows, simplified clocking in and out, and accessibility. For managers, the enhanced user experience highlights what is important, including unplanned labor costs, and time-sensitive insights such as no-shows, missed breaks, approaching overtime, and upcoming departures. “We are a special place to work because our engaged team members are a key differentiator for our business. With the Dayforce platform, we will be able to deliver a modern, mobile-first employee experience that enables direct communication, seamless shift bidding, and access to on-demand pay with Dayforce Wallet, which will help to differentiate Sobeys in a challenging labor market,” said Sandra Pasquini, SVP HR Operations & Systems, Sobeys.
These features and enhancements will begin rolling out to customers on the Dayforce platform in 2024.
About Ceridian
Ceridian. Makes Work Life Better™.
Ceridian HCM Holding Inc. is a global human capital management software company. Dayforce, its flagship cloud HCM platform, provides human resources, payroll, benefits, workforce management, and talent management functionality. The Dayforce platform is used to optimize management of the entire employee lifecycle, including attracting, engaging, paying, deploying, and developing people. Ceridian has solutions for organizations of all sizes.
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Recruitment & Retention
Principal Financial Group® | January 16, 2024
The picture of retirement is evolving with more Americans turning 65 in 2024 than any year1 before. According to new research from Principal Financial Group®, expectations around how and when to retire by generation vary greatly – placing increased focus on employee engagement and personalized investment strategies to help improve financial security and retirement readiness.
Phased retirement appeals to younger workers who want to retire earlier
According to the Principal Financial Well-Being IndexSM, among Americans in the workforce, gradually decreasing hours is the most desired way to retire (52%) and is most preferred by Generation X (67%) and millennials (56%). Baby boomers and Generation Z report similarities in how they want to retire, with nearly half preferring to move immediately from working full-time to not working at all. This echoes the most common approach taken by current retirees surveyed2, a group in which just over one quarter (28%) either transitioned careers or gradually phased down from their primary career.
“Attitudes and expectations for retirement continue to evolve, and we expect the desire to approach retirement in phases will continue to grow with future generations,” said Chris Littlefield, president of Retirement and Income Solutions at Principal®.
While there are some similarities in how generations want to retire, they have different expectations on timelines and the age at which they plan to retire. The youngest generation, Gen Z, expects to retire at 55 – approximately 10 years earlier than baby boomers (68) and Gen X (64), and four years sooner than millennials (59).
Employees prioritize saving for retirement
The survey revealed employees are focused on balancing basic needs with long-term savings outcomes against a backdrop of ongoing economic pressures that continue to top their list of concerns. Employees of all generations ranked saving for retirement as their top financial priority, followed by affording basic needs and paying off consumer debt3.
"Saving for retirement is the No. 1 financial priority for employees surveyed, which validates that access to workplace benefits and financial wellness programs is helping Americans save for retirement and achieve better financial outcomes,” Littlefield said. “Going forward, increased personalization as well as tailored savings and investment strategies that take into account an individual’s financial goals, lifestyle, health care needs, dependent care obligations, retirement income expectations, and other unique factors will help achieve improved financial security in retirement.”
Retention and recruitment of older employees critical for business success
Employee interest in phased retirement has added value for employers. Most employers (77%) agree that the knowledge older employees have about their company is crucial to their business’s success. Employers concerned with “having valuable employees retire” are more likely to take actions to either retain them or hire employees who previously retired from other companies.
Despite this, not all employers have experience with offering phased retirement. Only 11% of small and midsized businesses4 reported they offer phased retirement job opportunities on a regular basis compared to nearly one quarter of large businesses5. However, interest is there, as 61% of businesses that don’t offer a phased retirement still receive questions from employees about the options.
See all results and insights from the latest Principal Financial Well-Being IndexSM (PDF).
According to the Alliance for Lifetime Income
This wave included a survey of 137 individuals between the ages of 50 and 75 who consider themselves retired or have previously fully retired and gone back to work.
In order to be included in the survey sample, employees must work full-time, and their employer has to offer either health insurance or retirement as an employee benefit.
Businesses with 2-499 employees
Businesses with 500-10,000 employees
About the Principal Financial Well-Being IndexSM
The Principal Financial Well-Being IndexSM surveys business owners, decision makers and business leaders aged 21 and over who work at companies with 2-10,000 employees and offer either health insurance or retirement as an employee benefit. The nation-wide survey, commissioned since 2012, examines the financial well-being of American workers and business employers. In 2020, the Well-Being Index was transformed from an annual survey to a regular pulse, offering three waves, revisiting questions and measuring sentiment regarding timely issues in the small and midsized business marketplace. In the first pulse of the Well-Being Index in 2022, the employee audience was added to the survey to compare and contrast key sentiment from employers. The survey was commissioned by Principal® and conducted online by Dynata from November 6-13, 2023, with a total of 500 business owners, decision makers and business leader participants and a total of 200 employee participants. This wave included a survey of 127 individuals who consider themselves retired or have previously fully retired and gone back to work. The research report focuses on providing a holistic perspective on key trends and timely issues in the small and medium business market.
About Principal Financial Group®
Principal Financial Group® is a global financial company with 19,500 employees1 passionate about improving the wealth and well-being of people and businesses. In business for more than 140 years, we’re helping more than 61 million customers1 plan, protect, invest, and retire, while working to support the communities where we do business, and build a diverse, inclusive workforce. Principal® is proud to be recognized as one of the 2023 World’s Most Ethical Companies® by Ethisphere2, a member of the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index, and a “Best Places to Work in Money Management3.”
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