Chloe Thompson
5 min read
While employers are reaching for a range of eye-catching employee benefits which they hope will improve their Employee Value Proposition (EVP), there’s a whole host of benefits which have an actual impact on what’s most important to your employees – their everyday lives.
Sure, having a ping pong table in the break room is great (if you’re good at ping pong!), but truly impactful employee benefits are the ones that help employees stretch their income, make their day to day easier and help with life’s unexpected moments.
Luckily, it’s not that hard to put these kinds of benefits in place. You just have to know where to look. Let’s take a peek at a few of these everyday benefits that can really help your people:
Help improve employee savings where they already spend
As you’ve no doubt heard a million times, there’s nothing certain in life but death and taxes. Immediately after that, we need to eat. The most thrifty among us may grow some of their own food, unfortunately, for most of us, we turn to our local supermarkets for our groceries. And when the average household in the UK spends £228 a month at the supermarket, providing your employees with supermarket discounts can go a long way to reduce their monthly spend.
On top of food, you can be sure that your employees will be buying clothes – unless you have an extreme dress down policy, of course. The average household spend on clothes in the UK is £92 a month so a discount here can really help, and you’re right, there are many providers who offer some form of discount at various clothing stores. The best benefit providers give instant discounts which can be used on top of any sales, offers or promotions running at the time. This ensures a great user experience which means employees will actually use the offering and save money, rather than saying, “Oh, I’ll just use it next time.”
What do you provide in the office?
Whether you believe the headlines or not, apparently people in Britain each spend over £2,000 a year on high street coffees. Imagine the kind of holiday you could have with that money. Fortunately, there are employee benefit providers who do offer discounts here. And if you’ll let me blow my Reward Gateway trumpet, we have instant discounts at the UK’s favourite high-street coffee retailers Starbucks, Costa, and Caffè Nero.
Away from that, you can help here by providing your employees with coffee for free as an example of low-cost employee benefits. I’m not suggesting you need to put on a full barista experience but a kettle, a few cafetiers, and some decent coffee grinds will go a long way with your people. Not to mention saving them from paying for their daily coffee.
At Reward Gateway, we’re also lucky enough to have free toiletries in office such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorants, hair products, and sanitary products. There’s even back up headphones in case someone forgets to bring their own that day. These are all small things in an engaging workplace which help everyday and come at a small cost to you, the employer.
Help when life throws a curveball
Life can deliver plenty of unexpected events which might catch your employees off guard. And when that happens, it’s always good to know your employer has your back. There are two ways you can help your employees here – a no-interest company loan and a technology benefit. At Reward Gateway, our employees can ask for a company loan based on their salary which they can then pay back over 12 months. Whilst we do offer financial resources to employees, it’s also important for them to be covered in case of an unexpected cost springs up.
We’ve also got our SmartTech™ net payroll benefit which allows employees to get the latest technology instantly from Currys PC World. And away from iPads, TVs, and laptops, employees can use SmartTech™ to purchase white goods too.
Should an employees fridge freezer break, washing machine flood or oven refuse to heat, they might be tempted to take out a high-interest payday loan to cover the cost of replacing their appliance. With SmartTech™, they can get their appliance that day, have it installed and pay for it from their salary interest-free.
Give them a cheaper commute
The benefits of cycling to work are well documented and having a Cycle to Work offering in place is a great way to make getting to and from work much cheaper. When I got my bike through Cycle to Work, it cost me £56 a month. Compare that to the £150 a month I was spending to get the tube to work and there’s a saving of £94-a-month. And now that I’ve paid for my bike, I’m saving the full £150 a month!
Let them build their work around their lives
In the same vein as a Cycle to Work scheme, the benefits of flexible working are also well publicised. And it’s a simple benefit which have a big impact on an employee’s everyday life. Whether that means being able to avoid spending huge amounts on childcare or being able to work from home and avoid using up a day of annual leave on the only day a an engineer can come to fix the boiler, flexibility can massively improve work life balance.
When considering impactful benefits for employees, it’s most important to keep sight on the benefits that your employees will actually use, and not just what everyone else is doing. By focussing on your people first, you’ll naturally improve your EVP and deliver a great employee experience, one benefit at a time.