Recruitment is a constant battle for HR. It’s a persistently nagging requirement, it never goes away. Just as soon as you think you’ve got enough stellar team members on board, someone else hands in their notice and you’re back to square one.
Locating talent takes a lot of time. It’s expensive, and excruciatingly difficult to get right. And even when you’ve spent time, money and resources finding the perfect fit – how do you get that person to stay?
Half the battle is retention.
As an HR and benefits professional, you know the key is making your business an attractive place to work. You want to be an employer of choice, and you understand that offering a comprehensive benefits package is important. But how do you stand out from the crowd when you’ve got a limited budget to play with?
The solution is making it relevant, and to do that you need to know your workforce inside out. In order to hook the best talent, you need to understand which benefits matter to your people, on a human and personal level.
Sometimes this requires a little thinking outside the box. If you’ve got a very young workforce, you need to excite them. If you’ve got employees with low income, your focus needs to be on stretching their salary further. It’s not always about money either – sometimes the simplest gestures, like flexible working – so that parents can pick their children up from school, can make your people feel most valued.
If you are going to spend money then you need a benefit that impacts everyone, in order to generate maximum return. You need to offer something that’s measurable, so you can map ROI and prove it’s working. And you need to go above and beyond your bread and butter benefits if you want anyone to take notice.
The truth is, you might not need to invest much money to get an engaged workforce. Success in terms of benefits strategy is getting your employees to draw a higher value from the benefits you offer than it costs you as an employer to provide. Salary is the most expensive way to reward staff, so you want to offer lots of additional exciting benefits as part of a well-rounded total compensation package.
In some cases, educational benefits can have a bigger impact on cementing an employee’s longevity at your company. In the first place you need to make sure you communicate your existing benefits expertly so that your employees are well informed about what’s available to them. Building on that, your employees will love you if you provide useful educational advice such as health or financial wellness initiatives.
By demonstrating that you care about employee wellbeing you may spark their reciprocal buy-in to the business. As a result you’ll decrease turnover, and in turn, impact your bottom line.
(About the Author: The ability to work for a fast growing employee benefits and engagement company called Reward Gateway is never boring. I saw this company grow from 70 employees to 190 in just one year. With brands like IBM, Yahoo, McDonalds and much more under our belt we can say for sure that we are the heavy weight champion in our industry. My position in the company is SMM (Social Media Marketer) which means my priority is to grow our social presence and eventually bring more happy clients that will learn how to engage their employees and see their business grow as a result of the happy employees.)
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