Benefits, not for benefits sake

For an employee benefit to be “beneficial” to an employee, it needs to be relevant and desirable. I mean, what’s the benefit of giving employees a 30 day leave entitlement if nobody feels they can book time off and can carry it forward to next leave year, or having a flexible working policy that doesn’t grant requests due to the requests not meeting the business need?

Consider how does your organisation review and extend their employee benefit offering, so it remains current?

One way is through an employee survey.

The survey may have sought feedback from employees on what benefits, that are currently offered, are good and why.

Then further questions about what additional benefits would employees like to see introduced.

Then, with this feedback, an organisation can consider the statistical validity of the responses and decide how it is going to respond to the employee preferences.

Communication is then key, to inform employees what the survey findings were, how the organisation is going to respond and associated timescales.

Organisations that have more than one physical location should also be mindful of the benefits that they offer, and whether the benefit is site specific or across all locations.

A benefit that engages one group of employees, may have the potential to alienate other groups of employees because of the accessibility to the benefit.

Another consideration is looking at what your industry and/or location competitors are providing as employee benefits and evaluating if these are something that your organisation should be offering.

The decision should not be solely based on remaining competitive but considering, is this the right benefit for your employees that works within your organisations culture? There is a lot of media coverage about employee benefits that are “new”, “innovative” and “ideas outside of the norm” however, for any of those benefits to have a true impact and long term benefit, if the organisations “basic” benefits are not perceived to be right by their employees, then the new benefit, does not stand a chance.

In my view, back to basic benefits includes, but not limited to, a fair and transparent pay structure, access to opportunities and an appropriate management culture. I want organisations to focus on these areas, before jumping to the new, bright and shiny idea which really, should be the seen as the ‘cherry on the top’.