Do employee benefits help businesses grow?

In a word, yes. Let’s face it, all businesses need a measurable return and staff who love their employers, are much more productive.

If the answer is no, why would we bother to spend money on employee benefits? A little flippant perhaps, but ultimately when we spend any money as a business we need to see a measurable return.

The answer to the question requires consideration of a wide variety of factors and I have summarised my thoughts below:

The link between benefits, reward, our people and our business

For me this means looking at our strategy, the resultant objectives and the role of our people within this piece. We then need to decide what behaviours we want to encourage from our people and how we use reward and benefits to influence and support these behaviours.

Love my employer!

Employee engagement is the buzzword at the moment. The ‘why’ is widely documented, but ‘what’ creates the engaged person who goes the extra mile? What are the important parts of the relationship between a business and its people? Our own work indicates people need to:

• Believe in the credibility of management
• Feel respected by management and colleagues
• See consistently fair management practices
• Have pride in their work
• Good quality workplace relationships

The above in large part boils down to high levels of trust and good communication.

Taking this to the next level and help supporting these factors:

• Leadership
  A responsible leader cares about his or her people. Employee benefits can clearly help support this statement

• Two way communication
  People can be involved in two way employee benefit communication through surveys, focus groups, workshops and other methods of ongoing feedback that help shape the package.

• Diversity & Equality
  Providing people with choice helps to meet the diverse individual circumstances that are present across a workforce

• Wellbeing & Work Life Balance
  An open mind to flexible working helps promote work life balance. Employee benefits help employees manage their financial and physical wellbeing

• Empowerment & Recognition
  Offering people choice over their benefits empowers them to take control and share responsibility with the employer for their future. Imaginative recognition schemes can influence and reward behaviours that are aligned to values

• Team Spirit
  Encouraging, rewarding and recognising the team is a powerful way to bring people together with a common purpose

• Pay & Benefits
  This should speak for itself, but only works if a total reward philosophy is promoted alongside all of the other factors

• Workplace Culture
  Consider how employee benefits link to the culture. As an example: work hard, play hard and share responsibility for helping people meet their needs as they progress through their life

• Pride in both their role and the business
  Employee benefits say ‘we care about our people and we are a responsible business’. They help people to feel pride

• Impact on both the environment and society
  Providing access to carbon offset schemes, charity giving and offering people paid time off for volunteer work all support these factors

If you want to speak with an employee benefits broker, Hooray Health & Protection charge no fee for any new or existing clients.