In my previous article “Hierarchy of Employee Needs
” I wrote about employee psychological needs and how good benefits are a part of that. Good benefits can improve employee belongingness and even love for your organization. Having a benefits program is showing your employees that you care. This is assuming you have already tackled the basic needs of your employees also discussed in our previous article above.
Your organization needs good benefits because they will help create loyalty, increase employee health, reduce employee stress, reduce bad turnover, attract top performers, increase productivity, and increase revenue.
Create Loyalty
An organization with no benefits risks losing employees. Benefits are an excellent way for an organization to show that they care about employees and their families. If an angry spouse can’t get a tooth fixed or a child must go without medication, then the employee will start looking for a new job.
Angry employees and their families will lose all their loyalty. This can lead to negative rumours. Enough rumours and an organization can lose business and even shut down. Loyal employees will defend you and your organization helping to prevent negative rumours.
Employee loyalty is an important part of the long-term success of all organizations. If you train an employee to do a job, then you want them to work a long time. This way you don’t have to waste time training another new employee.
Increase Employee Health
Employee health is vital! How hard or precise can an employee work if they have a bad tooth that is giving them headaches? This can lead to low performance including extra sick days.
Benefits will help because the employees will take off part of a day to have their and their family’s teeth checked and cleaned twice a year. This is predictable and acceptable. If an employee has a toothache for three months how many days will they miss?
Healthy employees can concentrate and work harder!
With the COVID-19 pandemic still lingering you may want to get an HR Professionals’ advice for when an employee tests positive for COVID-19 or even the seasonal flu by reading my article “My Employee Has COVID-19“.
Reduce Employee Stress
Reducing employee stress is related to employee health above. The employee may not be sick but a sick family member may be sick. The benefits you supply help to reduce the stress of trying to make extra money to help a sick family member.
Employees that must have a second job to get extra money or benefits will be overworked. The overworked employee will feel stress more. This again can lead to low performance and missed work.
Reduce Bad Turnover
Bad turnover is when your top performers or regular backbone employees leave your organization. Top performers know they’re valuable so will look for work where they are shown their value with benefits. Regular backbone employees will also start leaving because they want to work with the best so they can learn and get better also.
If you have a high bad turnover rate, you will be left with your low performers. This is not a good work environment because low performers always create toxic environments. Naturally, this may lead to other major issues with your organization.
Attract Top Performers
Top performers may only account for 10-20% of your employees, but they account for up to 80% of your production or revenue. Keeping them and attracting more is very important. The top performer knows their value and will always be on the lookout for the next great opportunity.
You may pay your top performers more and that is okay. Low-performing employees that don’t like making less than a top performer can step up and get better or leave. Benefits can be the tiebreaker when top performers are looking for new opportunities. High pay is great but high pay and good benefits are better.
Good benefits can keep and attract top performers!
Increase Productivity
As I mentioned a few times above, benefits can help your employees be more productive. Having less to worry about when it comes to health can be a big de-stressor. Having your health issues dealt with right away can reduce sick days.
Consider the Alex Freytag and Tom Bouwer book Profit Works: Unravel the Complexity of Incentive Plans to Increase Employee Productivity, Cultivate an Engaged Workforce, and Maximize Your Company’s Potential from Amazon if you need more support in this area.
A healthy worker can be a productive worker!
Increase Revenue
As a direct result of healthy low stressed employees, performance and production can increase. With this comes the possibility of higher revenue! Better performance and more revenue are the goals of most organizations.
Benefits may cost the organization more, but the positive returns may be far greater!
What Next?
Start investigating what benefits your employees want and what the prices may be for your organization.
If you currently have benefits, it might be time to consider increasing them.
If you can’t increase your benefits or can’t currently afford any benefits, bring your team together and brainstorm a plan to get the benefits. You may come up with some creative ideas and a long-term plan.
All articles on this website were written by Ian Hopfe. Connect with Ian on LinkedIn!