Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER July 13, 2015 8 NEWS Are you looking to reach occupational health and safety professionals across the country? Get your listing in the Health and Safety section of HR Vendors Guide online and in print. Visit www.hrreporter.com/hr-vendors-guide to enter your firm's information. Visit www.hrreporter.com/hr-vendors-guide HR VENDORS GUIDE HR VENDORS GUIDE Attention OHS vendors and suppliers hoped to reach a goal of 50 per cent reduction of voicemail, but the response among employees was so overwhelmingly positive, it was able to reduce voicemail by 65 per cent, said Michael Fusco, spokesperson for JPMorgan. "More employees are relying on other forms of communication like email." Instead of voicemail, there'll be a message saying the person is not available and to try later or reach her by email. But does this kind of move make sense? Absolutely, according to Matt Stambaugh, tech expert and vice-president and COO at Auto- mated Aeronautics in Calgary. Voicemails can build up throughout the day and people must listen to them in a linear or serial fashion by logging in, enter- ing a password and listening to each message one at a time, he said. "Whereas something like a text message or email or anything that allows you a visual representation of who called, the length of mes- sages, sometimes there's some priority capability beside it — you know the red flag beside it — it lets you at a glance understand what's more important than another." Stambaugh said he finds it much more useful to look at email right away to know if he needs to respond or not, and some people don't even bother listening to voicemail. "Voicemail made a lot of sense when that was the primary tech- nology, and the telephone was what you had, it was the best there was. And as different technologies like mobile communications and cellphones that have texting and email are taking over the work- place, there are simply easier ways to leave a message." e buzzword in the industry these days is "unified communica- tions" and that means having some kind of portal to access voice infor- mation, texts and emails, he said. But there will still be those who prefer in-person communica- tion — and that makes sense, said Stambaugh. "People are going to use email and text to then set up an actual conversation, and I think that's the right balance… you've got a really rapid-shot form of com- munication, like text and in most cases email, designed primarily to set up a more full-fledged con- versation, be it over the phone or in-person." What really matters is what constitutes efficient, effective and convenient communication, said Michael Schrage, research fel- low at the MIT Center for Digital Business in Cambridge, Mass. "Voicemail is a means to an end, which raises the obvious question: What's the end? Do we really want to hear the sound of somebody's voice, do we really want to spend 45 seconds leaving a message, or do we want to come away with or to leave the essential message, the essential information, the es- sential affect, essential feelings that's going to get the action that we want, the response we want? ose are the better questions." Some people prefer to talk on the phone or have face-to-face meetings by flying five hours for a 20-minute get-together, but that isn't cost-effective, he said. And while that might be OK in our personal lives, in our professional lives, people care about things like productivity and deliverables, so the issue is going to matter more, not less. "If organizations want to cling to 1995 like it's never going to go away, that's fine, but do me the fa- vour of giving me their names so I can sell their stock short," said Schrage. e question is how many peo- ple are happy using voicemail and are they productive employees who matter to the organization? "My bet is absolutely not, ab- solutely not. e people relying on voicemail in the year 2020 are the people who the organization desperately wants to lay off or do a buyout or get rid of," he said. What's prompting the switch? is is very much a demographic phenomenon, said Schrage. "People like myself have grown up with voicemail so we've been trained to use voicemail. My stu- dents, as a general rule, people under the age of 30, don't use voicemail. If you leave a mes- sage for them, they will see the number or the name of person who called them and they almost never… play the message back, they almost always text or email or call back and say, 'What do you want?'" he said. "People… over the age of 40, will get wistful and nostalgic; the people… under age 45 will say this is cute but completely irrelevant to how I work in my organization." ere does seem to be an age divide when it comes to the use- fulness of voicemail, with a break probably around employees in their mid-30s, said Stambaugh. "There's a sense for younger employees for sure that it's a fairly inefficient means of leav- ing a message or attempting to communicate." Cost-savings are also behind the severing of ties. For Coca- Cola, eliminating voicemail will mean savings of US$100,000 per year — but the decision has more to do with simplifying work than trimming costs, said spokesper- son Amanda Rosseter, according to the Huffington Post. And for JPMorgan, at a savings of US$10 per month per person, there was a positive impact of US$3.2 million for consumer and community banking in annual- ized savings, said Fusco. But Stambaugh said he has seen some wildly different cost estimates. "It obviously depends a lot on the back-end system. Some com- panies are going to legitimately see costs savings if they're large enough, in the hundreds of thou- sands if not millions of dollars. But it seems like most people are doing it as much for a communi- cation workflow as cost savings." ere are definitely some lega- cy voicemail systems that are end of life, he said, and that's a good time to make a decision: Do you transition to back-end technology or just retire it? Mobile future Even landlines may be on the way out, with a complete switch to mobile options, said Stambaugh. "at definitely helps with cost savings because you can retire a whole ecosystem of telephony sometimes and it tends to simplify workflows." ere are a variety of technolo- gies available for rapid communi- cation, along with more advanced telepresence options such as web- cams or even holographic tech- nologies, said Stambaugh. "Voicemail will still be around in one form into the future, I just think it's going to become less and less prevalent. ere are still fax machines and there are still some niche roles where fax makes sense but I think voicemail will be sup- planted by email and other forms as a primary messaging technol- ogy," he said. "I wouldn't be surprised, in the next five years, if we don't see more companies looking at (pull- ing the plug on voicemail)." But it's a slow burn, he said, adding he's not heard of many Canadian companies making the same cuts. "e concept seems so straight- forward but I haven't really seen it pushed or used extensively yet. I think it's just because we're so used to using phones." Could landlines be the next to go? WORK < pg. 1 "But it's a tradeoff — can you save money by knowing sooner that your employee might get can- cer and what things they can do or they might be prone to high blood pressure or cholesterol? Can you target better health coaching at some of those emerging risks and prevent future drug claims or dis- ability claims?" said Jandali. "Doing a health-risk assess- ment throughout an organization is a best practice and a lot of em- ployers are getting there. It's hard to get good takeup — you really have to promote and incent peo- ple to participate — but once you do, then you can target messages accordingly, and then keep tar- geting and then coach, and then re-measure to see if you're having a positive impact, as well as then concurrently tracking absence data, drug utilization, disabil- ity data to see if you're impacting things at the end of the line." Paramedical services Almost one-half (47 per cent) of plan members submitted at least one claim for paramedical services in the past year, and those that did submitted a total of 7.3 claims on average — a frequency second only to prescription medications (9.5), found Sanofi, adding this lev- el of use may suggest the need for eligibility based on clinical criteria rather than self-perceived needs. "If we're… having clinical re- views for new drugs coming in, if we're having to put restrictions or putting a lot of interests on differ- ent costs around drugs, why are we not that way with paramedicals when they're probably a high cost of the plan also?" said Peak. "(Para- medicals are) may be an area plan sponsors need to look at a bit more to make sure it does serve the plan like it's supposed to." The challenge is paramedi- cals are a smaller overall dollar amount but are growing more quickly, said Mark. So, again, are employers getting value for what's being invested? And do employ- ees value the benefit? For example, massage therapy is one of the highest utilized para- medical services, she said. "Some would say, 'Jeeze, is that really where we should be spending our money when we know mental health and other things are such a concern in the workplace?' On the flipside, you've got some employ- ees saying, 'I really value that as a personal health promotion and I have no other disease, I have no other issue, but I want to get value from my benefit plan.' So it they value it and they're utilizing it, then that may be a good outcome from an employer's standpoint as well. It's not black and white." Employers need to be careful, said Jandali. "You want to take a good look at what paramedicals they're using and why. So if it's just massage and it feels good, of course, that's not as preventive as you would want but there's probably a lot of really useful paramedical utilization that is helping keep people at work — chiropractics, physiotherapy." Look at usage SURVEY < pg. 3 "ere's a sense for younger employees for sure that it's a fairly inefficient means of leaving a message or attempting to communicate."

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