The challenges of attracting, retaining and developing great people lie at the heart of building any organization. Providing good health care benefits and helping people invest for a life after their career are generally seen as key elements of an attractive employment package, but both are increasingly difficult to deliver as health costs spiral, longevity increases and financial markets' volatility reaches new peaks. At the same time, demographic shifts mean that firms are faced with talent and leadership shortages. All of these problems are magnified for global organizations, as they try to balance benefits of global consistency with the flexibility to meet local conditions.

Aon Consulting's third annual survey of employers in the United States, available at aon.com/benefits_survey, reveals how organizations are meeting these challenges, both at home and overseas: 43 percent of the 1,100 respondents represent global organizations.

Three key themes are strongly influencing decisions

Three key themes resonate through all industries and organization sizes as employers seek to develop successful human resources strategies to shape their future workplace.

1. Health and Benefits: The employer/employee partnership has seen a rise in wellness programs which is contributing to a healthier workforce and bottom line as health care costs continue to spiral upward.

• Health care costs continue to be a primary concern for employers, with costs rising globally in the 8 percent to 10 percent range. To manage their costs, employers now appear to be focusing on strategies to improve the health and productivity of their workforce, instead of just cost shifting through plan design changes. This trend is evident in the high numbers of employers who have implemented wellness benefits, like disease management (60 percent), promoting physical activity (68 percent), smoking cessation programs (46 percent) and health risk appraisals (48 percent) in 2008.
• Employers are asking their employees to become more active participants in their health care choices as a means to better manage health care costs. In 2006, 13 percent of employers offered a consumer-driven health plan; by 2008 that number had doubled to 27 percent of employers.

2. Retirement Savings & Pension Plans: Employers are offering super-charged retirement-planning tools and are shifting savings responsibility to employees.

• With 93 percent of employers offering some type of defined contribution (DC) plan and only 30 percent offering a defined benefits (DB) plan, the trend of increased employee responsibility for accumulating retirement savings continues. Yet, 40 percent of employees are presumed to know "little" or "very little" about how much income they will need to retire. An additional 46 percent of employees only understand "to some extent" how much they will need to accumulate to retire. Employers are now taking an active role to help their employees plan for retirement: Almost 90 percent have introduced tools to help employees understand how much they need to save for retirement, 40 percent offer target date funds, 30 percent offer automatic enrollment, and 22 percent offer a Roth feature.
• Of the employers still offering a defined benefits plan, 22 percent expect to freeze benefits, no longer allow new entrants into the plan and/or decrease the level of benefits provided by the plan in the next two years. The reason? According to 63 percent of those employers, it's because of the level or volatility of cost.

3. Human Capital & Sucession Planning: The anticipated leadership and talent shortages threaten organizational sustainability.