Workplace Benefits: 5 Tips To Help You Set Up Benefits

Workplace benefits can help boost staff moral, lead to higher retention rates, help employees save money and go towards fulfilling an employer’s duty of care.

However it is not always easy to get the offer right, to ensure the benefits have something for everyone and come together as a coherent suite of benefits.

At EnjoyBenefits, we have set up schemes for hundreds of companies of all sizes and in all sectors.

Here are our tips to help you get your workplace benefits spot on.

1. Think of everyone. When thinking which workpace benefits to include, try to think of every type of employee.What would be of use to a parent to young children? What about those who enjoy regular nights out. Which benefits might suit those who care deeply about fitness, what about people who might have a family to think of and be concerned by the price of health and dental insurance.

   You can try thinking what each group would welcome, you can ask employees or you can even attempt to draw up personas – the young parent, the fitness fanatic and more.

   Whichever approach you take, you need a suite of benefits that is truly for all, not just of use to a select few.

2. Don’t assume any benefits are too complicated.A mistake some make is to rule out certain benefits immediately because of an assumption that they are hard to implement or maintain.One example of this is the workplace nursery scheme. This benefit can save working parents thousands of pounds, they get access to superb nurseries paid as a salary sacrifice and so huge tax savings follow – often around £3,000 or £4,000 per annum and considerably higher still for those with two children in nursery.

   The scheme looks difficult to implement, it has to be a proper partnership between business and nursery and there are annual meetings to be held. On top of that, details have to be kept and maintained for every employee using the scheme and their payments have to come out seamlessly and head into the nursery’s bank account.

   It all sounds a lot of hassle, why bother?

   However, the reality is that the scheme can largely run itself if set up correctly. It needn’t be burdensome, it can be little more than a quick catch up with the nursery. On top of this, the benefits can be huge – helping parents balance their worklife balance and being a perk that helps keep and entice the very best staff.

   Assume nothing, don’t rule out benefits before you’ve even started.

3. Think to the future.You can always add new benefits as your workforce changes, there might be benefits that become more applicable in years to come, perhaps new roles encourage people of different ages to those you tend to employ.You can also be pre-emptive. You can think about how your workforce might change, be that both in terms of existing members of the team and new recruits.

   If you have a lot of 20 somethings, there is a good chance that many of them might start families in years to come and so their choice of benefits will change.

   You can also consider the employees you will recruit or might wish to have join your team. What type of person do you want to recruit, if it’s graduates straight out of university the benefits you might add will be different from if you were taking on more experienced staff.

4. Don’t Ease In.There is no need to ease in with one or two benefits, with an aim to add more in future. We would argue that to do so can actually be counterproductive.Starting with just one or two benefits is of little help to the majority of staff, instead just a small number get to benefit. Whereas before at least everyone was equal, nobody was benefiting from workplace benefits, now a select few are.

   There could be a degree of resentment and the creation of a negative attitude towards benefits that it later becomes hard to shift.

   When you implement workplace benefits do so in a proper, thorough manner.

5. Don’t try to pre-judge any benefit’s popularity.If we were to provide you with a list of all the benefits offered and the average take up rate of each we can guarantee you’d be amazed by some of the figures.There are benefits that you might think would have a low take up yet are hugely popular. It is therefore a shame that companies often exclude some benefits because they assume they won’t be popular.

   This preconception might well be wrong, the benefit may turn out to be much loved. It also doesn’t matter overly if any particular benefit has a low take-up rate. Employees don’t know the take up rate for any benefit so if, theoretically, a benefit had no subscribers it wouldn’t be a problem. The offer would simply sit there, waiting to be used.

   If a benefit is worth having, it is worth having – add it and interest will come in time.

About Us

At Enjoy Benefits, we have great experience in helping companies of all sizes introduce benefits that are suitable for their workplace.

Benefits are easy to set ups and ongoing administration is then run through a hub, this allowing employees to manage their own benefits while the employer can see which benefits are proving popular and what level of take-up each has had.

If you would like an obligation free chat to discuss which benefits might work for your business and your employees, please contact us by calling 0800 088 7315 or using our Contact Form.