Look after your staff: providing employee benefits shows you care

One of the quickest ways to reduce staff turnover and increase performance is to increase employee engagement amongst your workforce. Offering competitive pay and employee benefits can play an important part in keeping your people engaged. Providing benefits that your staff value is a great way to demonstrate that you care about them, their families and their welfare.

Benefits give employees confidence that they are valuable to your organisation and that you have their best interests in mind. They can also help to provide peace of mind that they have access to additional support when they need it.

Providing a comprehensive benefits package can play an important part of your recruitment and retention strategies and give you a competitive advantage.

• People only truly understand and value the benefits you offer when you communicate them. Create and implement a communication strategy to keep your people up to date with their benefits.
• Offer benefits that your people will really value. Popular benefits include pensions, life assurance, private medical insurance, childcare vouchers and gym membership. But, understand what your employees really want and tailor your offering to meet their needs.
• Align your employee benefits to your company culture. For example, introducing free lunches and additional holiday days are simple but effective ways to give something extra to your people which they will really appreciate.
• Employee benefits don’t have to be expensive. But, if you can’t afford to offer everything, consider whether you can use salary sacrifice to help meet the cost.
• Embrace technology. Use it to tell your employees all about the benefits you offer them. Being able to access the information they need at the time and level that’s right for them on their smartphone, laptop or tablet will make your benefits even more accessible.

There is little point in having a fantastic range of benefits for your staff if nobody knows about them! Communication is key! Employees only appreciate the value of their benefits when they understand them. Communicating your employee benefits – even if it’s purely a pension – is absolutely vital. Firstly, because it gives your people peace of mind. And secondly, it says you care.

Over the years we designed and introduced successful pension and employee benefits schemes for hundreds of employers. Of all shapes and sizes. The biggest lesson we learned was that effective communication is vital.