What Do Employees Want?

The most important person in my business is arguably my paraplanner. If it wasn’t for her, I’m not sure I’d manage to get much, if anything, done. She is the backbone of everything I do here, and I never want to lose her; if there’s something I can do, within my means, to make her feel as important as I know she is, I’ll do it.

I expect any of us with employees feel the same way. Most of us understand how important it is to attract the right kind of people to our business, that’s a given. But how do we make sure we keep them?

Employee Benefits

Implementing a good employee benefits package is a noble place to start. Considering 75% of employees said they were more likely to stay with their employer because of their employee benefits package, it would be remiss not to at least review your offerings.

A recent survey said (every time I say this, I feel like I’m loosely paraphrasing Family Fortunes) only 41% of UK workers feel satisfied with their current employer benefits, so this is definitely an area you can stand out on.

But how do you know which benefits to choose? How do you know which ones will be worth the cost? Are any going to make a real difference to your business?

With varying options such as flexitime, office dogs, subsidised lunches etc. it’s difficult to know where to start, and not everything is going to be suitable for your business.

Almost 90% of employees said the top 3 benefits, after a company pension, that are MOST important to them are:

1.    Private Medical Insurance (43%)

2.    Death in Service Cover (40%)

3.    Critical Illness Cover (35%)

Private Medical Insurance

If an employee has to wait for 16 weeks on NHS treatment, and were unable to work during this time, or not able to work at full capacity, this will have a significant on their life, and the life of the business.

Private medical insurance could come to the rescue here, giving your staff access to private medical facilities and letting them skip the NHS queue for eligible conditions. Shorter wait = less time off work.

Death in Service Cover

This is essentially life insurance, but provided to your employees, free of charge, by the company. The level of cover provided is usually calculated as a multiple of your employee’s salary.

Only around a third of families have life insurance cover, and you can imagine many households would struggle financially if a monthly income suddenly vanished overnight. Providing this cover would really help take a weight off your employee’s shoulders and show them you really care about them and their family.

Group Critical Illness Cover:

This will pay out a lump sum to your employee if they are diagnosed with a critical illness and typical cover is between 1 and 5 times your employees’ annual salary.

How much do employee benefits cost?

Probably not as much as you expect. I can almost guarantee that whatever figure you are thinking about is way off and compared to the cost of re-hiring and re-training it’s likely to be a drop in the ocean.

If that’s not reason enough, the majority of them are a tax-deductible business expense, and doesn’t that make it a win-win?

*Sadly, only 1 in 20 employees want dogs in the office (sorry Milo and Bailey).

*https://www.cipd.co.uk/Images/UK-working-lives-2_tcm18-40225.pdf

*https://www.aviva.co.uk/business/business-perspectives/featured-articles-hub/employee-benefits-survey/

*https://employeebenefits.co.uk/statistics-show-the-importance-of-employee-benefits/#:~:text=Employee%20benefits%20are%20significant%20in,extremely%20important%20in%20their%20decision.