General How long has it been since you reviewed the objectives of your benefit and service program? Have you permitted it to become a giveaway program rather than one that has the goal of improved employee morale and, consequently, increased productivity? What effort do you make to assess results of your program? Do you measure its relation to reduced absenteeism, turnover, accidents, and grievances, and to improved quality and output? Have you set specific objectives for your employee publication? Is it reaching these goals? Is it larger or fancier than you really need? Are you using the most economical printing methods, paper, etc. Are there other, cheaper communications techniques that could be substituted? Has your attitude toward employee benefits encouraged an excess of free "government" work in your plant? Is your purchasing agent offering too much free-buying service for employees? When improvements are recommended in working conditions -- such as lighting, rest rooms, eating facilities, air-conditioning -- do you try to set a measure of their effectiveness on productivity? When negotiating with your union, do you make sure employees have a choice between new benefits and their cents-per-hour cost in wages. Can you consider restricting any additional employee benefits to those paid for by profit-sharing money, such as was done in the union contract recently signed by American Motors Corporation? Insurance Do your employees understand all the benefits to which your insurance entitles them? Are they encouraged to take full legal advantage of these benefits? Have you publicized the cents-per-hour value of the company's share of insurance premiums? When did you last compare your present premium costs with the costs of insurance from other sources? Can your insurance company aid you in reducing administrative costs? Do you try to maintain the principle of employee-contributed (as opposed to fully company-paid) programs? Holidays, time off, overtime Do you protect your holiday privileges with an attendance requirement both before and after the holiday? Do you plan to limit additional holidays to area and/or industrial patterns? Have you investigated the possibility of moving midweek holidays forward to Monday or back to Friday in order to have an uninterrupted work week? Are you carefully policing wash-up time and rest periods to be certain that all other time is productive? Are you watching work schedules for boiler operators, guards, and other 24-hour-day, 7-day-week operations in order to minimize overtime? Are you careful to restrict the number of people on leave at one time so that your total employment obligation is minimized? Plant feeding facilities Have you considered using vending equipment to replace or reduce the number of cafeteria employees? What are the possibilities for operating your cafeteria for a single shift only and relying upon vending machines or prepackaged sandwiches for the second- and third-shift operations? Have you checked the cost of subcontracting your cafeteria operation in order to save administrative costs? Are there possibilities of having cafeteria help work part-time on custodial or other jobs? Can staggered lunch periods relieve the capacity strain on your feeding facilities? Would it be feasible to limit the menu in order to reduce feeding costs? Have you considered gradual withdrawal of subsidies to your in-plant feeding operation? Are you utilizing cafeteria space for company meetings or discussions? Recreation facilities Are your expenses in this area commensurate with the number of employees who benefit from your program? Have you audited your program recently to weed out those phases that draw least participation? Do employees contribute their share of money to recreational facilities? Have you considered delegating operational responsibility to your employee association and carefully restricting your plant's financial contribution? Could an employee's garden club take over partial care of plant grounds? Would a camera club be useful in taking pictures pertinent to plant safety? Are you spending too much money on team uniforms that benefit only a few employees? Are you underwriting expensive team trips? Are you utilizing vending machine proceeds to help pay for your program? Transportation and parking Do you know the trend in your cost of maintaining access roads and parking lots? If you use parking attendants, can they be replaced by automatic parking gates? Will your local bus company erect and/or maintain the bus stops at your plant? If you provide inter-plant transportation, can this be replaced by available public transportation? If you use company transportation to meet trains or to haul visitors, would taxis be cheaper? How efficient and necessary are your intra-company vehicles? Can they be re-scheduled? Can part-time drivers be assigned to other productive work? Paid vacations Which is more economical for your plant -- a vacation shutdown or spaced vacations that require extra employees for vacation fill-ins? Can vacations be spaced throughout the 12 months to minimize the number of employee fill-ins? Do you insist that unneeded salary employees take their vacations during plant shutdowns? What can your sales and purchasing departments do to curtail orders, shipments, and receipts during vacation shutdown periods? Retirement Is an arbitrary retirement age of 65 actually costing your plant money? What sort of effort do you make to assure that older or disabled workers are fully productive? Would early retirement of non-productive, disabled employees reduce the number of make-work jobs? Will your union accept seniority concessions in assigning work for older or disabled employees? Medical and health Can you share medical facilities and staff with neighboring plants? If you have a full-time doctor now, can he be replaced with a part-time doctor or one who serves on a fee-per-case basis only? Can your plant nurse be replaced by a trained first-aid man who works full-time on some other assignment? Do you rigidly distinguish between job- and non-job-connected health problems and avoid treating the latter? Are you indiscriminantly offering unnecessary medical services -- flu shots, sun lamp treatments, etc.? If you have an annual or regular physical examination program, is it worth what it is costing you? A program to fit your needs Consider what you can afford to spend and what your goals are before setting up or revamping your employee benefit program. Too many plant officials are all too eager to buy a package program from an insurance company simply because it works for another plant. But even if that other plant employs the same number of workers and makes the same product, there are other facts to consider. How old is your working force? What's your profit margin? In what section of the country are you located? Are you in a rural or urban area? These factors can make the difference between waste and efficiency in any benefit program. Above all, don't set up extravagant fringe benefits just to buy employee good will. Unions stress fringe benefits, but the individual hourly worker prefers cash every time. Aim to balance your employee benefit package. Some plants go overboard on one type of fringe -- say a liberal retirement plan -- and find themselves vulnerable elsewhere. They're asking for union trouble. Communications If you want credit for your employee services program, let your workers know what they're entitled to. Encourage them to exercise their benefits. This can be done by stories in your house organs, posters, special publications, letters to workers' homes as well as by word of mouth through your chain of command. Some companies find a little imagination helpful. Hallmark Cards, Inc., Kansas City, Mo., has a do-it-yourself quiz game called "Benefit Bafflers", which it distributes to employees. M & R Dietetic Laboratories, Inc., Columbus, gives all its workers a facsimile checkbook -- each check showing the amount the company spends on a particular fringe. U. S. Rubber Company, New York, passes out a form itemizing the value of benefits. The blue-collar worker thus knows his insurance package, for example, costs $227.72. Insurance Have the insurance company or your own accounting department break down the cost of your insurance package periodically. You may find certain coverage costing much more than is economically feasible, thereby alerting you to desirable revisions. Check to see if some of your benefits -- such as on-the-job disability pay -- can be put on a direct payment rather than an insured basis at a savings to you. Use deductable insurance wherever feasible. It can put an end to marginal claims which play havoc with your insurance rates. Also, beware of open-end policies, especially in the medical field. This will mean that every time there's an increase in hospital rates your cost will go up in like manner. Put a dollar-and-cents limit on benefits. Don't go overboard on insurance that pays benefits only upon death. Generally, your employee will greatly appreciate benefits that protect him during his working life or during retirement. Special time off In granting bereavement leaves, specify the maximum time off and list what the worker's relation to the deceased must be to qualify. Thus, you avoid headaches when an employee wants off for his fourth cousin's funeral. Also, reserve the right to demand proof of death despite the fact that you'll probably never use it. Coffee breaks can be a real headache if not regulated. Vending machines can alleviate the long hike to the cafeteria during the break with resulting waste of production time. If coffee is sold at the cafeteria, let a few workers in each department get it for the whole group. Consider installing supplemental serving lines in production areas. Make sure milk for the coffee is placed in dispensers rather than in containers, if you are supplying the coffee. Otherwise, you may be saddled with a good-size milk bill by milk drinkers. Retirement policies Keep the retirement age flexible so skilled craftsmen such as tool and die makers can be kept on the job for the convenience of the company. And so deadheads on the payroll can be eased out at the earliest possible age. Make sure you have minimum age and time-on-the-job requirements tied into your pension plan. Younger men usually don't think of pensions as an important job benefit factor anyhow and they're liable to change jobs several times before settling down. Choose carefully between contributory or non-contributory pension plans. There are two sides of a coin for this decision. Workers usually think more of a plan they contribute to. And they can at least collect the money they put in, plus interest, when they leave the company. A non-contributory plan usually won't pay off for the worker until he retires. Thus, there is an added incentive to stay on the job. Holidays Make sure you don't pay for holidays that occur when an employee would not otherwise be working. These include: leaves of absences, illnesses, and layoffs. Consider adopting a system of holidays in which time off is granted with an eye to minimum inconvenience to the operation of the plant. It's usually not too hard to sell workers on this as it gives them longer holiday periods. For example, the Friday after Thanksgiving can be substituted for Washington's birthday. This reduces the number of expensive plant shutdowns and startups. Require each employee to work his last shift both before and after the holiday to be eligible for pay. This cuts the absentee rate. Eating facilities Consider using vending machines rather than subsidized cafeterias. Latest models serve hot meals at reasonable prices, and at a profit to you. If a concessionaire runs the cafeteria, keep an eye out for quality and price. If the soup tastes like dishwater, your employees won't blame the concessionaire. You'll take the rap. Check your cafeteria location to make sure it's convenient for most employees. You may save valuable production minutes with a change. Vacations Spread your vacation period over the widest possible span of time or shut the plant down for two weeks. This will cut the expense of vacation replacements. And with the shutdown method there will be no argument as to who gets the choice vacation dates. Also make sure you have reasonable requirements as to hours worked before a production employee is entitled to a vacation. You might try providing standard vacation time off but make the vacation pay depend on the number of hours worked in the previous year.