In a recent poll conducted by Employee Benefits, 32% of employers said they had given their employees pay rises to help them with handling the cost-of-living crisis. Another 30% of employers said they were considering giving each staffer either a pay rise or a one-off payment.
If you fail to provide suitable financial support to your own workers during the cost-of-living crisis, they could become inclined to leave the company. However, what forms of help can you give?
Offer discounts on both must-haves and nice-to-haves
In negotiating these discounts, you could significantly reduce financial pain for your workers. Good examples of cut-price deals you could offer include retailer discounts, company gym memberships, and even discounts on eating out and days out.
Of course, some things that you might have initially deemed nice-to-haves — like smartphones — can actually prove essential in practice.
Provide debt support
As revealed in a separate Employee Benefits article, almost a quarter of UK adults — 23% — have cited being in debt as one of their largest financial concerns.
You could therefore take your cue from companies that already run financial education seminars providing advice on managing and paying off debt. Through payroll, you might also be able to offer loan consolidation, as some companies already do.
Run an Employee Assistance Programme
An Employee Assistance Programme — often casually referred to as an EAP — is aimed at helping employees to overcome personal issues that, if left unaddressed, could adversely affect these employees’ work performance as well as their general health and wellbeing.
Many companies therefore see why implementing an EAP is a sensible policy — and it can help with both directly and indirectly alleviating financial woes.
Take out a group life insurance policy
Many of your employees are naturally likely to appreciate you offering them life insurance, which will pay out to dependents of an employee if he or she dies. However, if you do want to add this insurance to the employee benefits package, you should choose a group life insurance policy.
That’s because it would enable you to cover multiple people under one policy and so spare yourself much of the admin entailed in providing life insurance to a large number ofindividual people.
Communicate your benefits
Unfortunately, it’s easy for many workers not to realise just how many employee benefits they have close at hand. That’s why you should go to great pains to make sure that your staffers are genuinely in the loop about what is available to them.
Work hard to reduce the stigma
Many people who struggle with debt or other money issues are reluctant to talk about the matter — perhaps because they feel as though it is a reflection of some personal failing of theirs.
However, when someone does run into financial difficulty, the culprit can simply be an unavoidable change of circumstances rather than anything that the affected individual has done.
You should get this point across to your workers so that they can feel comfortable with approaching you for financial help if they genuinely need it.
