In order to attract the best talent in your industry, you need to show you’re willing to go above and beyond as a business to prove to your employees you care about them and their wellbeing. Genuine care about your employees should be what drives this, rather than seeing it as just a tick box exercise. So, we’re here to help introduce a few benefits you should be offering aside from the obvious benefits of competitive pay, good holidays and a strong pension plan in the modern job market.
Ongoing Training Opportunities
As an employer, it’s important that ongoing training opportunities are possible when someone joins your company. You are helping with their personal development, which is a real draw for people when they’re on a job hunt, plus you’ll also benefit as you will build a more experienced and well rounded team. Employee satisfaction will be higher and the quality of service you’re able to offer will increase, making your business more profitable if you’re in a position to invest in ongoing training. Even if you’re not in a place to offer this, often businesses get complacent once someone is up to scratch with how things are run and don’t offer ongoing internal training to develop employees internally.
Building employees’ experience within a company to eventually be promoted into internal roles is far more cost effective than hiring through a recruiter, where you may be paying up to 30% of the new employee’s first year salary. When you’re looking at senior members of the team, this is a significant investment, and likely much more than it could cost to invest in training for your existing team. Also, the transition period of internal candidates into more senior roles tends to be much smoother than bringing someone new in. Of course, there are benefits to bringing new employees into a company when you need a fresh set of eyes, however in many cases, ongoing training and promotion opportunities are far more beneficial to your company.
Life Insurance
Something else that isn’t usually offered but is a fantastic benefit is life insurance. You pay a monthly premium and in return, your employees will be able to select a beneficiary and in the event of their death, the insurer will pay out to look after their loved ones. As a business, you can expense this as a business cost so it could also be tax effective for you. However, the main thing is you’re providing peace of mind for employees. At the same time, you should also look at key man insurance, which protects your business against loss in the event someone essential to the business is unable to work or dies. Work with a life insurance broker for this as you can get strong policies to cover all different elements of life insurance, to benefit your employees as well as to protect your business.
Gym Memberships
We all know that when we exercise regularly, it keeps our bodies and minds healthy, and generally we get less ill, therefore require less sick days. Paying for gym memberships for your employees will encourage them to exercise more and therefore become healthier. Physical and mental wellbeing in the workplace are essential, and with regular exercise, people are more motivated, have more energy and have an increased focus. You could also put on some corporate activities, perhaps encouraging a 5 aside team or entering a badminton league, to help boost morale whilst also keeping your team healthy.
Perhaps you also do something like a monthly challenge, it could be a running or walking challenge where people record their activity on Strava and the top 5 most active employees get a reward, potentially an additional holiday day or a giftcard for a health company. The power of exercise can’t be denied, and so long term, this is a small investment in terms of the improved quality of life and work that come with it.
Flexible Working
Lastly, flexible working should be offered as an employee benefit. Times have changed and it’s now become the norm for people to work at least a few days at home, or have the option to do so. Flexible working also includes flexible hours, so some companies will have set hours everyone needs to work, say 10am-3pm, then for the rest of the day, they have the freedom to work around their own schedule. Perhaps someone volunteers one evening and it’s really helpful for them to start and finish a couple of hours early. A parent might benefit massively from being able to start at 10am and then work some hours later in the evening once their children are asleep. This is about acknowledging that everyone has a life outside of work, and doing what you can to help accommodate it.
