During a company’s hiring process, a lot of emphasis is placed on the range of benefits which can be used to attract candidates. Company benefits are an important part of maintaining and initiating a good company culture and showing support for employees, whilst also aiming to reward and motivate them, too.
A good benefits package can help your team feel valued, but it also has perks in that it helps with retention and recruitment. However, if your team has a number of long-serving employees, who have been there for 4+ years, it’s important that you revisit your benefit package with these employees in mind. Remember, a quality benefit package doesn’t have to be high-cost, particularly for long-service employees who are familiar with the business and culture. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the benefits leaders can offer long-serving employees.
Private Health Insurance
Giving employees access to private health insurance, which is either part or fully covered by the business, is one of the best employee benefits that you can provide. Depending on the policy chosen, private health insurance can cover anything from consultations and surgery to cancer treatment and routine healthcare checks such as the opticians or dentists. You can also choose to extend this cover out to an employee’s next of kin or family member.
This benefit can give peace of mind to employees and shows that, as their employer, you care about their health and well-being. To support this, you can guide on taking leave during the day to attend appointments or review your sick pay stance. After all, if a long-standing employee is unwell or needs time off, they might get better reassurance knowing that their income won’t be affected.
Flexible Working Arrangements
Covid changed the way of working for many offices, with many workers who had been working full time within an office environment having to adapt to working from home. For many, this change came with a whole host of benefits, such as no commuting time, spending less on food and travel and being able to better control their work-life balance.
It’s been shown that flexible working arrangements and hours can contribute to employees being more engaged and productive and, as a company, you can look to offer flexible working arrangement benefits to long standing employees in a range of different ways.
Flexible Working Hours
You can offer flexible working hours to long standing employees which allows them to change or alter their working hours in some way. For example, if their commute is long and stressful, you could look to stagger their working hours so that they can avoid peak commuting hours. Another way is to allow employees with children the time to do school drop offs and pick ups, or provide alternative support with working hours during the school holidays.
Work From Home
It’s now easier than ever for employees to work remotely and, during Covid, your employees may have found that they prefer to work from the comfort of home. You can offer long standing employees the option to work from home a few times a week if they would prefer and if, as a business, you are seeing no change in productivity.
Death Benefits
There are a range of insurances available for key persons within a business which, although don’t provide them directly with benefits, offer some peace of mind for their loved ones and families. Also known as relevant life insurance, death-in-service benefits offer financial security for long standing employees within your business.
The easiest way to offer death benefits to employees is to take out a group life insurance policy. Then, employees can nominate their beneficiaries of who will receive a lump sum payout in the event of death during the set policy term. This death doesn’t need to be about their employment with your company. As a company, you can choose the payout amount of the policy that you want to provide, however, most employers will choose a multiple which is between two and four times the employee’s annual salary.