Regardless of its size, the success of a business depends entirely on the quality of its workforce. Employees make use of their experience, skills, and talent to contribute to the development and growth of the company. The talent employees bring must be maintained and motivated so you can accomplish the best results.
How? The answer is simple. You must have employee benefits at your workplace.
Employee benefits packages are a way of showing your workforce you appreciate the work they do, you care about them, and you want to make their life better. It’s your door to building trustworthy and valuable relationships that lay the foundation for a great business.
Okay, so you pay your employees a salary, great! It’s an excellent motivator to encourage employees to show up for work every day, but that’s not merely enough! Employee benefits are non-financial rewards like paid vacation, maternity leave, health insurance, and more. There are over 100 different types! So how do you choose? Well, that’s what we’re here to help with.
By the end of the article, you’ll have a sense of the must-have employee benefits that should be offered to employees.
The ultimate guide to boosting your healthcare ROI
Squeeze the most out of your employee healthcare costs
Why Are Employee Benefits Important?
Employee benefits are important because they keep your staff happy and engaged! A well-rounded benefits plan shows employees that their organization is invested in their happiness.
Benefits offered to employees go beyond happiness and care. It boosts the morale of your staff, appeals to fresh talent, increases retention rates, and ergo results in optimum levels of productivity.
Tip: The types of employee benefits you offer must be appropriate, considerate, and thoughtful for your workforce. It shouldn’t just be another box you check.
At the end of the day, the benefits employers offer not only improve the employees’ quality of life and health but also increase the value of working for an organization.
Top 7 Must-Have Employee Benefits Employers Must Provide
Whether it’s retirement benefits, dental insurance, child care, or sick leaves, implementing an effective benefits plan requires a thorough analysis and study of your brand image, budget, employees, and company. Whatever crops up in that list, surely a list of these must-have employee benefits will make the list!
1. Comprehensive group health insurance
Whether you read the HBR or any other source, the forerunner of all must-have employee benefits are insurance benefits like a comprehensive group health insurance. Considering the high cost of medical care and the after-effects of the pandemic, this is understandable.
Health insurance is usually one of the foundational benefits or the bread and butter of a comprehensive benefits package.
Unlike life insurance, health insurance is medical insurance that covers medical expenses. And typically when employers offer this, the medical coverage extends to families too.
Read more about what is a group health policy and what it covers in this informative article.
With health insurance, your employees can see doctors and receive treatments at highly reduced rates.
To make the most out of your group health insurance policy, you must get comprehensive health insurance, which means a healthcare policy that covers all physical ailments as well as other aspects of wellbeing. It might sound expensive, but it has its advantages.
Not just employees, but employers have advantages too. Read about all the advantages here.
After reading the above article, you know its advantages. With the help of a group health plan, you get happy and productive employees who stay in your company for the long haul. Not only are they satisfied and engaged, but also boost your bottom line, a win-win!
Pro tip: Your employees can include their family members in the policy. Give them the option to include or choose the people of their choice. This might be a small step, but it will reflect hugely on any employee.
While health insurance is one of the must-have employee benefits, it is quite a workload for HRs to manage.
With Loop, not only do you get a comprehensive health insurance plan and doctors who care for you like family, but also a support team that ensures the holistic wellbeing of your employees.
Beyond that, with the HR dashboard, the Loop app, and other product features, we ensure your health benefits run on autopilot with minimal intervention.
Don’t take our word for it. See how Livio's HR saves 99% of time on health benefits with Loop.
2. Flexibility
More and more, organizations acknowledge that while employees juggle multiple tasks at work, they also have demands outside of it.
Like paid time off, flexibility with schedules can reap enormous benefits and show your employees you trust them to get their work done - whether it’s teleconsults with their Loop doctors, picking up their child from school, or running a quick errand to the grocery store.
Flexibility reaches far and wide, but in essence, it permits your staff to work outside of the traditional 5-day workweek and 9 am to 5 pm to get work done. For example, SAP Labs does not track the time of entry or exit. The workforce decides their work timings. This gives employees the freedom to work at their best.
3. Wellness programs
Compared to over three decades ago, today, the concept of wellness in the workplace has grown and evolved.
Commonly, when we talk about wellness, what comes to mind is mental and physical wellness. However, there are actually seven dimensions of wellness - vocational, environmental, spiritual, financial, social, physical, and mental.
Employee Wellness Handbook
A quick and easy-to-read guide for improving your employee wellbeing efforts
All the seven influence and are interdependent on one another. Assuming one is unbalanced, it affects the other dimensions. When all the dimensions work together, health, performance at work, life at home, and overall quality of life will improve.
At Loop, we’ve got a selection of well-curated employee wellness sessions led by industry experts that tackle several issues employees face day in and day out, like dealing with procrastination, the prevention of diabetes, financial freedom, productivity, and more. The webinars help to effectively address the root cause and find actionable, everyday solutions.
Interested in available free wellness sessions for your teams, 4x a month? Get in touch!
4. Family-friendly benefits
Whether it’s spouse and children, parents or grandparents, every employee has one or more family members they need to take care of.
Of course, pension plans are excellent, but also curate employee benefits that help balance or improve family life. Think maternity and paternity leaves, and parental leaves. Further, you can also consider family-building benefits like fertility tests.
5. Time off
Paid vacation or paid time off helps employees just break away from work, unwind, relax or celebrate a day that may be of importance to them. Besides, it shows employees you trust them.
Did you know paid time off is one of the most cost-efficient benefits to help your employees reenergize? This encourages them to take a breather, which ultimately boosts morale.
A great example is Hootsuite, the global social media management platform. During the summer, they offered a company-wide wellness week, half days, and gave incentives to those who consumed their vacation days. Because of this investment, their employee engagement rose from 66 to 81 percent!
6. Mental health benefits
Although mental health falls under the wellness category, we’re separately calling it out, as, over the last decade, the importance of mental health has grown.
Many employees say that at least one factor in work - poor work-life balance, emotionally draining work, or burnout, adversely affects their mental health. They also go on to say that their employers either don’t offer appropriate solutions to meet their needs or it’s not easily accessible.
Having access to mental health support helps break the stigma around it and goes to show that there’s nothing wrong if you’re struggling with mental health issues.
Unilever, for instance, has a free well-being app that employees can access. It contains a host of resources like support from mental health professionals, management training sessions, classes, and more. This way, employees can keep a pulse on their personal wellness.
Whether it’s through wellness sessions or mental health consults, Loop has helped several companies and their employees with mental health issues.
7. Personalized benefits options
Every employee is different. What matters to someone may not matter to the other. And it’s tricky to meet the needs of all employees via a standard benefits plan. A better approach to this is personalizing benefits.
With this method, besides a set of fixed benefits, you can have a set of flexible benefits. Based on employees’ needs and wants, they can pick the ones that matter the most to them. This may include gym memberships, retirement plans, long-term disability insurance, fringe benefits, spending accounts, education allowance, etc.
This way, you can maximize the benefit of your benefits by working with each person to give them exactly what they want. Although the effort is a lot more here, the impact is much higher.
What’s On Your Must-Have Employee Benefits List?
By no means is this list of must-have employee benefits exhaustive. However, they’re the ones the modern workforce desires.
Download this quick and easy-to-read guide for implementing employee benefits that work for you and your organization
Setting up a robust benefits plan while ensuring your employees are satisfied and boosting your bottom line is both an art and science.
What you need is a partner like Loop where you get the best of both worlds! Not only can you offer your employees group health insurance along with added benefits, but also ensure HR tasks are well taken care of with minimal intervention and effort. It’s a win-win!
Our experts are always available for a quick chat to help you give your team amazing benefits! Let’s talk!
