Letter from the President
Dear Friends:

Return on investment—three small words with great significance, especially in the wake of a slowed economy and ever-increasing competitive pressures. Senior management at organizations of every type and size have charged their HR staffs with carefully measuring the value of all of their employee programs.

That’s why LifeCare recently enhanced our ROI tool—to ensure that our clients are able to accurately measure the value of their LifeCare program. The new ROI tool encompasses baseline data from a variety of sources, including 1) industry-specific statistics, 2) historical data collected from LifeCare’s own 18 years of experience, and 3) statistics that were recently gathered from thousands of employees within our client companies.

With the addition of the updated client statistics, the ROI tool provides clients with a sharper picture of the bottom line savings associated with their LifeCare program. To gather these statistics and ensure their integrity, we enlisted the services of Walker Information, a leading marketing research firm, which conducted the confidential online employee survey on our behalf. (In fact, you can read a very interesting article about employee loyalty penned by Walker’s Vice President, Marc Drizin, in the “Work/Life Trends” section of this issue of The LifeCare Connection.) Client employees answered a variety of questions about how LifeCare’s services helped them reduce stress and avoid absenteeism and lost productivity.

The LifeCare ROI tool—which is now available to all clients—measures three key components: employee retention; employee productivity (specifically, reduction in on-the-job time used for personal issues); and absenteeism associated with personal issues. With our enhanced tool, clients who wish to calculate the ROI and associated savings of their LifeCare program can “plug in” statistics that are specific to their industry or, better yet, statistics specific to their own organization.

Of course, calculating the ROI for your work/life program—or any employee program, for that matter—should be just the first step toward the greater goal of strengthening your company’s bottom line. The ROI information should then serve as the foundation for making ongoing adjustments to your programs as well as your communication efforts, which are essential to program utilization and ROI. As always, we are more than happy to help you raise awareness and utilization of your LifeCare program. Just contact your account manager to talk about your particular needs.

On behalf of the entire LifeCare family, I wish you all a happy, successful and prosperous 2003!

Sincerely,

John B. Place, President