Kaiser Permanente

Winning Years: 2011
Industry: Hospitals/Health care
Location: Oakland, Calif.
Website: www.kp.org

Kaiser Permanente offers employees quarterly retirement workshops that cover topics such as developing investment strategies, diversifying retirement portfolios with stocks, bonds and cash investments, choosing an investment mix and assessing risk tolerance, setting asset allocation targets, and recent tax law changes.

See also: How the 2011 Best Employers winners were selected.

The Kaiser Permanente Retiree Association has seven chapters with 5,730 members. The association provides members with the means of participating in social, recreational, educational, advocacy, benevolent and community service activities.
 
Additional Policies and Practices:

Workplace Culture/Continued Opportunities: Kaiser offers its full- and part-time employees the following learning and development programs: tuition reimbursement, in-house classroom training, online training and certification classes. Employees must work at least 20 hours per week to be eligible for the tuition reimbursement benefit.  

Long-service anniversaries are celebrated with announcements, parties and awards.

Kaiser has instituted several enhancements to its workplace culture because of employee requests. These enhancements include the development of an affinity group for retirees and the expansion of recruitment strategies to enlist a more diverse population.

Employees have opportunities to gain new experiences by working on temporary assignments in other departments, and on team projects. Mature employees have opportunities to serve as mentors and participate in leadership training programs.

Employees with permanent functional loss from an injury or illness are considered under the Interactive Process for Reasonable Accommodation. In these instances, a workforce planning and development team will train an employee to perform other duties that they are qualified for and which are suitable to their now functionally altered abilities. For employees with short-term functional loss, temporary transitional assignments are offered and cross training is provided in new or related responsibilities.
 
Benefits/Health: Employees working 20 or more hours per week receive individual and family medical coverage, individual and family prescription drug coverage, individual and family vision and dental insurance, individual and family long-term care insurance, as well as short- and long-term disability.

Health benefits for retirees 65 and over include individual and spouse medical and drug coverage, individual and spouse vision coverage, individual dental coverage, individual and spouse long-term care insurance, services of the employee assistance program (EAP), as well as individual life insurance or other death benefit coverage.

New hires are eligible for all of the above benefits upon retirement.

In addition, flexible spending accounts (FSAs) and health savings accounts (HSAs) are available to assist in covering out-of-pocket health care costs.

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