If employees were calling the shots, they’d ask for perks like million-dollar salaries and total freedom to do their work how they please. But as an owner, you need to be more realistic. After all, business resources are limited and you want to make some money at the end of the day.
In this post, we take a look at some perks that your employees will totally love that won’t do too much damage to your bottom line. Check them out below.
Frequent Team Events
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Team events are simply opportunities for people who work together to get to know each other better. And while they sound simple, they can have a tremendous effect on morale. Outside of strict working environments, people learn much more about each other, discovering things that they never knew before.
Team events can also be a chance to do something different from sitting in the office all day, tapping away at computers. You could go to a restaurant, theme park or even a soccer game, depending on the type of people in your team.
Let People Go Home Early On Friday
By the time it gets to Friday afternoon, employees start feeling tired. After about 3 pm, not much work gets done. Usually, you’re better off giving employees this time to do what they want so that they come into the office feeling fresh (and more productive) on Monday morning.
Even allowing staff to go home 30 minutes early on Friday evening if business is slow (and paying for it), can create tremendous goodwill. Usually, you’ll find that employees are more enthusiastic about working for you (and get more done during the week) when you take this approach.
Offer Free Snacks
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Free snacks don’t cost much money, but they can make a big difference in how employees feel about working for you. Just make sure that they’re healthy so that you can prevent staff illness and improve concentration levels. While serving up cake every day might seem like a good idea, in the long-run, it’ll just cause weight gain and damage.
You can also improve your employee’s lives by providing them with free lunch. This way, they don’t have to pack meals themselves or go to expensive local food venues.
Let Them Work From Home
Employees want to work from home – at least a few days per week. The reason is simple: it’s just so much easier than travelling to the office every day. Plus, it means that employees lower their risk of disease and don’t have to interact with people they don’t like.
If you want to offer employees the opportunity to work from home, you’ll need to implement remote monitoring software. This simply tracks what employees do via an online portal, giving you full visibility of their working hours and output level.
Provide More Annual Leave
Annual leave – just the phrase itself fills many business leaders with dread. Ideally, colleagues would work for you non-stop, predictably, for years on end. But finding that type of person is rare indeed. Most people want to enjoy their lives, not just earn money.
While difficult for business leaders, offering more annual leave can be a great perk to offer employees. For instance, if you currently offer 4 weeks, you might bump this up to 5. Furthermore, you might request that your employees allow you to decide when they take a percentage of their time off each year, not them.
If you’re struggling to cover employees taking annual leave, use a shift scheduling solution. These can help you plan out who will be in the office and when, making it easier to plan.
Private Healthcare
Private healthcare is expensive. But, in many cases, employees prefer it to regular wages (particularly if they are in the higher tax brackets). To make your private healthcare package even more attractive to employees, it is a good idea to include some extra benefits in the healthcare plan to provide added value. Introducing a vision plan, such as Ok.Vision is sure to be a popular perk with your employees. Go for comprehensive coverage and then deduct an amount from your employee paychecks to pay for it. If existing workers don’t like this, trial it on new hires.
Wellness Coaching And Fitness
Employees don’t like sitting down in chairs all day, tapping away at their computer. They worry that it will damage their health, encourage weight gain, and lead to illness when they are older.
For this reason, many firms now offer wellness coaching in-house. The idea here is to help colleagues achieve healthy minds and bodies in just a few minutes per day. You can also look into providing a gym on-site or, perhaps, even bringing more standing desks into the office.
Personal Development
Lastly, you might want to consider offering employees personal development training to help them upgrade their skills. Study after study shows that this perk is more important to employees than the amount of money that they get in their monthly paychecks.
The reason for this is simple: modern employees have grandiose expectations. Many believe that they have what it takes to be at the top of business, in charge of hundreds of employees. Training gives them the belief that you’re helping them get there, encouraging them to stick around.
Of course, not everyone can be a top business leader. But personal development is one of those job perks that comes back to benefit employers. Not only are colleagues much more likely to stick around (boosting your retention rates), but they also become more productive as well. Personal development provides them with valuable skills that they can then use to improve their overall output over time, making them better value for you.
Personal development can take various forms. You might, for instance, include training courses and events in their basic remuneration package. You can also hire outside facilitators or even put them through college in some cases, if you believe that the investment is worth it.
Wrapping Up
As we have seen, employees want more than just money. They want other things that improve their quality of life.
Fortunately, you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company to offer these perks. In fact, virtually any profitable business can provide them. It just requires targeting your perks towards the things that your colleagues actually want.