Companies big and small are always looking for ways to improve the quality of life in their workplace. They know that companies that focus on the well-being of their employees grow and improve every day.
Many organizations strive to offer employee benefits that go beyond the standard bonuses and vacation time. In this way, they’re also working on their employer branding, which helps improve their reputation – both among their employees and within the general job market.
Inspired by big names like Google, Facebook, and Netflix, companies also invest in unique corporate benefits that help further engage employees, retain talent, and attract new talent for open positions.
If you want to offer new and attractive benefits to your employees but are still unsure of your options, don’t worry! In this article, we will explain everything that you need to know. Let’s continue!
Why are corporate benefits becoming more and more attractive?
The relationship between recognition and performance is a vicious cycle. According to Bob Nelson, author of 1501 Ways to Reward Employees, managers often place greater value on employees who prove to be consistently improving their performance.
Moreover, according to him, different types of professional recognition can motivate employees to be more dedicated to their work. With this in consideration, corporate benefits can help increase productivity and improve work quality.
Offering attractive benefits demonstrates to employees that the company is taking care of them. As a result, professionals tend to stay in their positions for longer, which mitigates turnover.
To get great long-term results, it’s not enough to offer attractive benefits. It’s also necessary to provide salaries that are competitive within the market, career plans, and quality of life improvements.
How do you choose the best benefits for your company?
Before making any decisions, it’s important to understand what corporate benefits make sense for your company and which will produce the best results. What works for another company’s employees won’t necessarily work for yours.
Consider the values of your company and, above all, the needs of your employees, since they are the ones who will be enjoying the benefits. According to a study conducted by MetLife, it’s most effective to commit to actions that will help your employees achieve their personal and professional goals.
Thus, you should choose benefits that provide professional development and personal assistance to your employees. In order to ensure efficacy, your company can also carry out an internal survey to find out what your employees are most interested in.
How do you integrate these new benefits into your company culture?
The Metlife survey emphasizes that 49% of employees understand the advantage of their benefits and say that, thanks to them, their job performance has improved. However, 15% responded that they did not understand their benefits.
As a result, after choosing which benefits to add to your company’s package, it’s important to clearly communicate those changes to everyone. This initiative is necessary for employees to understand how to access these benefits– and so that everyone knows how useful the benefits are.
To ensure even better results, it’s important to create a manual of benefits. If your company has a company culture manual, it’s also possible to include this information there.
Remember to explain how to take advantage of the benefits and what the rules and regulations are. To facilitate comprehension, try to be very specific, list examples, and use images.
As you present the new benefits, get teams together, demonstrate how to use them, and show them where to find more information should they need it. After implementing these new changes, remind employees periodically via email or during meetings that new benefits are now available.
It’s also important to encourage managers to use benefits. In this way, they can motivate the other employees on their team to do the same, which helps spread the word about the value of utilizing corporate benefits.
8 different employee benefits
Have you realized the importance of offering benefits to your employees and now you want to make changes at your company? To help you choose which benefits to implement with your employees, here we outline eight examples of unique benefits that you could offer:
1. Therapy bonus
Investing in employees’ mental health has become more and more common. With a fast-paced routine, many employees can become overwhelmed and stressed. Without addressing these issues, they may experience burnout.
To avoid burnout among your company’s employees, you may want to create a mental health bonus, in which employees are given a fixed amount to spend on therapy sessions. You could also partner with a professional or group of psychologists to set up a discount for your employees.
2. “14th-month salary”
In Brazil, the 14th-month salary is an excellent way to recognize the work of your employees and invest in their development. As opposed to a 13th-month salary, this isn’t distributed through a cash bonus, but in the form of additional training.
The employee can look for courses or workshops with the value of a month’s work that contribute to their professional development. You can also set a fixed amount for everyone, but it’s important to make this very clear in the benefits manual.
If you choose to allow employees to decide how they will use this benefit, it’s essential to explain the administrative process to them. For example, if the employee can select a course or workshop, they might have to submit an application to HR and explain how their chosen course will contribute to their professional growth.
3. Help for new parents
Companies like Google offer parental leave for new parents and may also provide bonuses that help them buy necessary items like diapers, baby food, and wipes.
The goal is to support the employee in their new stage of life. In addition to feeling encouraged by the additional assistance, this benefit may also motivate the new mom or dad to return to work after the baby is born.
4. Yoga and meditation classes
Many companies are already getting behind yoga and meditation in the professional environment to benefit the well-being of their employees. This is even the case with big brands like Nike, Twitter, and Instagram.
The benefits of these activities are diverse. Employees’ productivity improves, the level of stress in the workplace diminishes, and companies often observe an improvement in their employees’ quality of life.
It’s ideal to hire a professional instructor to go to the office once or twice a week to give open classes to your employees. That way, everyone can practice together and release their tension from a day’s work.
5. Financial education
According to data from the magazine Expansión, employees who are stressed by their economic situation tend to miss work more frequently. In addition, their productivity can be negatively affected.
Given this fact, offering support for their financial education will help professionals better manage their salaries. This initiative might also improve their quality of life, which will benefit their productivity in the long run.
This benefit can be offered through a partnership with a financial advisor, available to all those interested. It’s also possible to schedule a talk or workshop to provide advice on this important topic.
6. Mentoring
Having a mentor assigned to each employee by the company itself shows that you care for their individual growth and well-being. In this way, each employee feels recognized and happier with their employer.
Corporate mentoring brings advantages such as a positive impact on the employee’s personal life, a focus on the organization’s results, greater talent retention, lower training costs, and easier onboarding for new talent.
7. Home office assistance
Many companies moved to remote work during the pandemic, and several preferred to continue with this model or have adopted a hybrid approach in its place. Therefore, it may be interesting to offer a benefit to employees that corresponds with this new working environment.
Home office assistance is a simple action that helps with the basic costs of adapting to working from home. For this, you can determine a bonus that helps with electricity bills, internet, and even office accessories such as laptop stands and office chairs to make their remote experience more comfortable.
8. Language courses
Offering language courses, especially in English, helps to combat professional illiteracy in the workplace. If your employee doesn’t understand the vocabulary that is necessary for their daily work, it will be difficult for them to develop professionally and, consequently, the results of the company may be affected.
To this end, providing professional English courses is a beneficial practice for your organization’s employees. At Slang, we recognize the importance of this language for all professionals and that’s why we’ve created more than 100 courses focusing on different positions and industries.
With Slang, employees can learn terms in English that they use daily in their profession. All courses are available online on our platform, which is based on machine learning and will make it easier for your employees to learn.
In addition, your company can choose to only assign the topics that most relate to your employees’ everyday lives. All of our modules are “gamified”, and your HR department can have access to the progress of every employee. In this way, it will be easy to evaluate how frequently your employees are using this benefit.
Do you want to offer our professional English courses to your employees? Click here.
