Compensation and Benefits
Good people deserve good pay and benefits. Allstate’s total compensation package includes market-based salaries and a range of benefits tailored to the needs of individual employees and their families. In 2010 we paid $2.4 billion in non-agent employee total compensation. This included payroll taxes countrywide totaling $158 million, and $907 million for benefits that help employees support their families and stay healthy.
Employee Development and Continuous Learning
Once on board, Allstate employees are encouraged to grow along with the company. We provide a variety of learning opportunities, including workshops, online classes, college degree and certification programs and on-the-job learning.
For example, Allstate offers tuition reimbursement for both graduate and undergraduate courses from accredited colleges and universities. We help employees and their family members secure loans and scholarships for private (K-12), undergraduate, graduate and professional education.
We offer financial support and flexible hours for employees who participate in industry certification and professional designation courses.
More than 4,000 learning activities that help employees develop business, interpersonal, technical and leadership skills are available online, 24/7, from virtually every company workstation through our Learning Resource Network. In 2010, Allstate invested $2.1 million in the Network. We also support employee involvement in business conferences and professional associations.
Learning more about Allstate and understanding our business better also is the focus of programs that let employees and agency owners interact with top management. These include "town hall" meetings held at Allstate locations throughout the country, our Allstate NOW news website for all employees and our Gateway site for agency owners.
Work/Life Balance
Because employees are so crucial to our success, Allstate actively helps them manage the sometimes-conflicting demands of work and family. In our 2010 employee survey, 90% of respondents said their immediate manager gives them the flexibility to balance work and personal time. Options include flexible work hours, telecommuting, part-time status and job sharing.
We also offer the LifeWorks® Employee Assistance Program as a free service to employees. It includes:
- 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week LifeWorks® telephone access.
- Personalized consultations and assistance on issues such as parenting and child care, older adults, legal, financial, education, work, addiction and recovery, emotional well-being and referral and crisis intervention services.
- Individual referrals to resources in the community.
- Educational materials, kits, booklets and audiotapes on a wide variety of topics.
- Access to more than 200 issue-specific resource rooms, booklets, audiotapes, and more than 500 articles that address a wide variety of life issues such as domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse and HIV/AIDS.
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Employee Health and Safety
We are committed to providing a safe and healthy working environment, and to eliminating the causes of accidents that do occur. In 2010, 474 of our employees, or 1.5 percent of our employee population, filed a worker's compensation claim for work-related injuries. Of these claims, 69 resulted in lost work time. The most common claims were due to slips and falls, material handling, repetitive motion and vehicle accidents.
If accidents do result in lost time, Allstate offers programs to help employees recover and return to work through the Integrated Disability Management Program, which combines short-term and long-term disability benefits with worker's compensation benefits.
Employee Satisfaction
To ensure our programs are effective, and to encourage input from employees themselves, Allstate conducts an annual voluntary and confidential employee survey called VOICE. It measures employee perceptions and behaviors that directly affect our business results. All employees, including officers, are invited to participate in VOICE, which is administered via the Internet and analyzed by Allstate human resources professionals with the help of an outside vendor.
A key measurement provided by VOICE involves overall employee satisfaction. And while our employee satisfaction remains higher than industry benchmarks, the satisfaction rate among Allstate employees was 80 percent in 2010, down slightly from 85 percent in 2009.
Over the past two years we have experienced drops in the employee response rate to VOICE. This decline may be attributable to changes in the way we administer and analyze survey results, including changing the survey from anonymous to confidential.
Management teams across the company are asked to review and discuss survey results with employees and create annual action plans to improve the team's work environment.
Employee Turnover and Layoffs
The past few years have been filled with turmoil in the economy and financial markets and high catastrophe losses. As a result, Allstate proactively protected shareholder value and adapted our business to the changing environment. Nevertheless, as was the case many businesses, Allstate was forced to take some cost-cutting measures including freezing new hires in some areas, lowering or eliminating annual bonuses and in some cases employee layoffs. Some of these measures will continue into 2011 and will be reevaluated as the economy strengthens. For proprietary and competitive reasons Allstate does not release employee turnover data by age group, gender or region.
One more indication of Allstate's commitment to being an excellent employer comes from
awards
and citations by outside publications and organizations.