Stay ahead of the competition with your employee benefits package

For recruiters, the benefits package has become ammunition in the war for quality staff. A company needs competitive employee benefits, or they’ll be outgunned by their competitors in the race for employee acquisition.

Recruitment and retention of quality staff is becoming more challenging. Employee tenure in roles has been trending down, and employees are more likely than ever to seek a new role. Employers find it increasingly difficult to hire skilled employees, even when the market for the skills they need is flush with talent.

Battle the big boys with competitive benefits:

Financial benefits

We’ve spent a huge amount of time recently harping on about the effects of financial stress at work, so we’ll spare you the rhetoric here. However, it’s a real problem and a growing one even for higher earners. Offering discount schemes, salary sacrifice, financial education support or wealth management are all ways to ease the burden of financial worry on staff.

Medical care

Keeping employees healthy improves performance, reduces absences and leads to greater job tenure. Common medical benefits usually surround access to private healthcare, medical spending cashback, and time out of the working day to access that care. Dental care and eye care are also important areas which staff appreciate assistance with.

Office culture

Increasingly, as employees from new generations enter the workplace they bring new expectations about how they’d like to be treated at work. This means the working culture you create becomes part of your benefits package. Relax dress codes, encourage employees to care for themselves, be transparent about the company, employ recognition and take employee feedback about their job conditions seriously.

Parental cover

While there is a statutory period where parents are absent to care for children, what an employee actually needs to take care of a baby isn’t just time off. Other companies are offering perks like a concierge service to take care of errands like laundry and shopping, financial aid for new parents, childcare vouchers, support groups and, in some cases, on-site care. Alongside these employee benefits, flexibility for parents is extremely valuable in balancing child care and working life.

Flexibility

The power in the employer/employee relationship has shifted further over to the employee. As a result, employers are wondering more and more how newer generations of staff want to work, giving rise to more flexible working arrangements. Typically, flexible working arrangements are concessions to the needs of an employee’s personal life, but the details aren’t set in stone. Remote working, flexible scheduling, telecommuting, compressed work weeks or annualised hours worked all qualify as a flexible working arrangement.

Pet care

More workplaces are making concessions around pets in the workplace as they scramble to create enticing work environments for millennial workers. With half of homes in the UK having a pet, and a quarter having a dog, letting well behaved pets into the workplace isn’t so crazy an idea. However, it’s not plausible for every workplace for a variety of reasons we’ve covered before. Benefits which avoid bringing pets into the office would include pet insurance, discounts on pet food and time to care for pets at home.

Wellness

Employee wellness goes beyond just having access to medical care. Generally, this includes access to healthier food options, exercise during break periods, working towards a smoke free workplace, rewarding self-care and providing health education.

Support

Many employees need support for their personal lives. Giving employees the resources to deal with personal obstacles means they’re less likely to bring problems into their work environment. Top employers provide EAPs, support with long term disabilities and chronic illnesses, access to mental health care and online personal support portals.

To wheel out an old cliché, if you’re standing still when everyone else is moving forwards, you’re going backwards. While you shouldn’t be constantly chopping and changing what you offer in employee benefits, you should be thinking about it. Measure what’s being used, measure the benefits of that use to employees and reassess your offerings on a regular basis. Your recruitment and retention depend on it.