Going above and beyond your standard benefits package is a powerful way to differentiate yourself as an employer and become a top place to work.
Benefits packages are designed to entice new hires and reward ongoing employees. The benefits you choose should reflect both your business strategy and the core values of your company culture. While this may seem like a natural part of your business structure, finding the right benefits program to match company culture requires a strong HR strategy. The alignment between the two is becoming increasingly important as transparency and company culture have come to the forefront of the employee-employer relationship. Companies are hiring more consciously for company culture and, likewise, professionals are taking a closer look at company culture as they decide which role to take.
One of the leading ways that professionals gauge a company's culture and compatibility is your unique benefits package. The details of your package inform new hires of the work-life balance you offer and what aspects of life your company values most. Everyone understands that a company that offers a doggy daycare loves animals, but the other details of your benefits packages also reflect your culture in more subtle and sometimes important ways.
What Your Benefits Say About Your Company Culture
Benefits packages are put together methodically. However, the way you make your choices, and which additional employee perks you choose to offer, reflect directly on the values of your business and company culture.
Benefits and company culture create a natural cyclical process. As benefits shape lifestyle, lifestyle shapes your team, team shapes the company culture, which in turn shapes your choices in benefits. Employees are learning to read these details and what they say about the company. Most of all, they are looking for a good match, for benefits packages that reveal a company they'd like to work for and a company culture they'd like to join. The right package helps to draw the right people who are the right fit for your team.
Of course, your benefits might not be sending the right message. For example, you might offer unlimited PTO as a work-life balance effort, but combined with employees real schedule burnout or time-off-guilt is created. Or your benefits may have stagnated while the company culture took off. Often, a benefits package is built from long-standing policies and stacked in pieces over time. Does your package still reflect your company culture? Or could this new way of looking at benefits help you hone a package that truly reflects your brand, company culture, and how you really want to provide for your employees.
Employee Benefits Define Lifestyles
An employee's benefits package is more than just money, insurance, and perks; In total it can define the lifestyle and work-life options of your entire workforce. No doubt, the schedules you offer define the schedules that your team can work and sleep. Beyond that, however, everything from insurance policies to wellness perks defines how people live. Your insurance packages may be configured for individuals, families, young people without health issues, or preventative care for all ages. If you offer stock options, you are also encouraging employees to learn about investing. Likewise, financial advisors and savings programs promote financially balanced employee lifestyles.
Of course, the spotlight today is on work-life balance and wellness benefits. Flexible and hybrid schedules are more adaptive to many lifestyles, backgrounds, and even medical accommodations. Providing fitness centers allows employees to stay active before, after, and even during their shifts. The options you make available with benefits packages effectively define and influence the lives your employees can lead while working the job.
Matching Core Values and Benefits Policies
Here are ways to innovate your benefits that go above and beyond the basics of insurance and compensation. Using these programs and ideas, you can build a benefits program that truly reflects the living company culture you have and want to nurture.
Family Values:
- Childcare support subsidy or on-site daycare
- Stable and Flexible Hours
- Elder caregiver support
Family values packages are a spotlight for businesses with many parental employees or employees with caregiver responsibilities and those who -at their core - always put family first. Family benefits also create a better work-life balance for all employees who may have obligations to the family at home.
Physical Health and Wellness:
- Fitness center and classes
- Sponsored gym and program memberships
- Addiction Support
- Healthy Catering and/or Grocery Sponsorship
- Access to Nutritionists or Trainers
- Family Sport Benefits
Keeping your employees physically healthy also promotes energy, focus, and performance. Both nurturing company cultures and go-getter teams focus on health and wellness to take care of employees (and counteract the downsides of a desk job or repetitive motion work). Show your team you care about their health in and out of the office.
Eco-Friendly:
- Clean commute incentives
- Local green catering
- Eco cause involvement
Many businesses embrace green and sustainable business practices and it shows through in their benefits. Teams that care about the environment want to be included in green initiatives. Give back that good feeling of a green initiative to your eco-friendly team with benefit-perks that also help the environment.
Mental Health:
- Flexible and Hybrid Schedules
- Teletherapy Options
- Access to Free Therapy Sessions
- Family Member Therapy Access
- Emotional Health Seminars
- Mental-Health Days
Taking care of employee mental health helps everyone. You can prevent burnout and put self-management tools into the hands of your team. Show you care about personal problems and mental-emotional health while providing for employee privacy and personal strength.
How to Tailor Your Benefits to Match Your Company Culture
Define Your Core Values
Start by refining your company culture and your core values. Unlike branding, this isn't about color and style - it's about the values your company acts on and prioritizes every day. What values does your brand proclaim to the clients, and how do you reflect that in business decisions? What are the values that drive your team and your mission, and how can your benefits reflect that?
Some businesses have strong family values and do everything they can to support parents and caregivers. They offer flexible schedules and insurance that provides coverage to family members in the household. Some companies value camaraderie and teamwork, and their benefits provide more group activities and group membership in shared benefits programs. Some are carefully eco-friendly and take that into every benefit decision from the recycled coffee sticks to the electric car services.
Assess Your Benefits Package and the Lifestyle It Creates
Take a closer look at how your benefits influence your employees' lifestyle, work-life balance, and access to essentials. You may realize that some policies are holdovers or too one-size-fits-all for either your company culture or the current flexible workforce preferences. Take this opportunity to separate the benefits you offer and reimagine new packages that better reflect the way you want to support and influence employees and entice new hires.
Choose Benefits that Reflect Your Core Values
Explore the many options that can reflect your company's core values and the work-life balance you want to provide. What will make your team comfortable, financially and medically secure, and satisfied? What will reduce burnout stress and increase productive focus? What will show your team that your business values the acclaimed company-culture values through and through?
Decide on a new set of benefits you want to work in and find better ways to structure the packages you already offer.
Build New Benefits Packages
Finally, reconstruct your employee benefits with the new perks. Each new employee package should not only offer balance and security, it should reflect the very core values of your company culture. Show new hires what it means to be part of the team and keep your current team onboard with benefits that make them feel like a part of your mission and operation.
Ready to discover the opportunities of a tailored benefits package for your company culture? Listen to your employees to grasp which benefits are working for your company and what your company culture needs to create a complete, satisfying, and healthy employee experience. Make sure employee benefits updates are an ongoing initiative to keep benefits evolving with your living company culture.
