With the “great resignation” in full swing, employers are finding it more challenging than ever before to keep people on the books. The moment they think they’ve found the talent they want, they lose it to a competitor.
Fortunately, there’s a way around this: offer your employees perks. The more you can improve their quality of life, the better you can compete in the labor market.
Check out these insane benefits:
Employees want to work on their careers, but they increasingly want to have children too. Unfortunately for many, it’s just not possible. Juggling a career and childcare costs is virtually impossible. No wonder the birth rate is plummeting worldwide.
Employers who step up to the plate and let their employees have their cake and eat it put themselves at an automatic advantage. If you can say to candidates that they can work hard on their careers and get their kids paid for by you, they’ll fall in love and never want to leave.
Remember, infant and childcare costs are sky-high right now. Average parents are paying between $600 and $800 a month, just for basic care. Looking after one child eats up more than 20 percent of most family’s household income, so if you can cover these costs, employees will have no reason to look for another job.
Employees don’t like commuting to work. It adds hours and stress to their day, which you don’t pay them for directly.
The trick here is to make getting to the office easier. Some tech companies are offering shuttle buses for rapid transit from one part of town to another. Others are offering money-off biking equipment or carpooling.
If you can, come up with something, even if it means giving employees the option to work from home a couple of times a week.
Using company stock options as a benefit is smart for a couple of reasons.
First, it lets you increase employee pay cheaply, without eating into your cash flow. You’re essentially rewarding them with sweat equity.
Second, it makes them more vested in the success of your company. A member of staff who owns 1 percent of the business is much more likely to do their best to make sure that it succeeds than if they own nothing.
Companies can often get big discounts on standard consumer gym membership prices when they offer it as a benefit to employees. Bulk buying and tax advantages both come into play.
Employees love gym memberships, particularly those in high-stress jobs. They’re able to leave the office at lunchtime and let off steam, before returning in the afternoon to resolve the rest of the problems.
Gym memberships also make employees healthier and happier. The more exercise they get, the more robust they feel. It helps them cope with the challenges of the day, reducing burnout incidence.
When people work for you, they expect you to offer them discounts on company services. From their perspective, it’s just a matter of courtesy.
While it can seem a little odd from a management perspective, it can have a tremendous impact on the way your employees view your firm. They see you as kind and generous, instead of stingy and profit-driven, helping morale.
If you want, you can take a leaf out of Google’s book and offer employees the chance to trial products before they become accessible to the general public. This makes employees feel special, since they are able to experience the benefits before anyone else (and brag about it too).
Here’s a totally original idea: why not let your employees choose their benefits instead of just offering the same perks to everyone?
When you think about it, this approach makes a lot of sense. Everyone is different so, naturally, they’ll want different benefits. For instance, some team members might want paid childcare while others who don’t have children might benefit more from gym memberships.
Firms that adopt these policies use employee rewards software. This lets them see the monetary value of rewards they’re offering, allowing them to adjust perks accordingly.
If you can offer employees plans for how they will progress in the future, they will be eternally grateful. Most workers aren’t too concerned about their low salaries today, so long as they can gain more money and status in years to come.
As an employer, you can be quite aggressive in terms of time horizons. Offer new recruits development plans that will come to fruition over the next three to five years.
After the pandemic, the majority of employees say that they want to continue working from home. They don’t want to have to go to the office everyday and grind out eight hours in a gray cubicle.
Managers aren’t too keen on the idea, but companies that are providing it are seeing benefits. They are the ones better able to hold on to their existing staff during this period of resignation.
If you really don’t want employees to work from home all the time, describe time in the office positively. Say things like “in this role, you’ll have the opportunity to occasionally work in-person with other team members at our state-of-the-art office facilities.” Make it sound like a nice way to break up the working week instead of something that they have to do.
Most workers aren’t saving enough money for their retirement plans. Thanks to high living costs and consumerism, thrift has become a rare thing indeed.
Deep down, though, employees know they need help -- and that’s where you come in. By offering retirement plans, you can take care of their savings for them. Putting money into tax-advantaged accounts automatically negates the need for willpower on their behalf. Plus it shows that you’re supporting them in their career.
Workers will occasionally get sick. It’s a fact of life, particularly in recent months. However, many employers have HR policies which seems to suggest that people should never get sick and, if they do, it’s their fault.
Of course, when it comes to paid sick days, you need to be reasonable. However, offering two or three each year is probably about right. When you do this, you prevent people from turning up to work ill and then spreading it to everyone else.
When employees work hard, they expect you to compensate them for it. However, many brands still don’t operate performance bonus schemes. As a result, employees feel disincentivized. Why should they put in extra work in the evenings or at weekends if they’re not going to get paid for it?
Performance bonuses help you avoid this trap. When you pay according to the value employees create, there’s less incentive for them to simply run down the clock. Instead, completing projects or hitting various KPIs is in their interest.
Most employers offer somewhere between 20 and 30 days of paid annual leave each year. This way, workers don’t have to feel like they need to be in the office 365 days a year. They can take a break from time to time.
Studies show that time off work can actually increase performance. Well-rested employees feel happier and are less likely to experience episodes of burnout.
Some highly successful companies now institute open vacation policies. These allow colleagues to take as much time off work as they like, so long as they continue to hit deadlines and achieve results.
With millennials now comprising the bulk of the office-based workforce, these spaces are having to change. Workers want them to be more like playgrounds than serious spaces geared entirely towards productive activities.
Furthermore, millennials believe that they should be able to be their “true selves” at work, and not office stooges. The office should be an enjoyable place, not Puritanical.
Here are some of the things you might like to try:
With more people than ever before working from home, allocating a home office budget is fast becoming a must-have perk. Workers want to feel like you’re supporting them, wherever they happen to be.
These days, you can use software to track your employee’s expenses. Just get them to submit receipts and then subtract these amounts from your taxable income.
These days, virtually everyone is exhausted by life and wants to give up. So offering your employees a wellness program could be precisely what they need.
Wellness helps employees counteract the effects of stress and sitting for too long. It can also reduce healthcare insurance costs over the long-run.
