4 Ways to Keep Your Employees Happy

In any company, happy and motived employees are essential for promoting productivity and an overall good workplace culture amongst staff. Offering employee benefits is an excellent way to ensure that your team feels valued and appreciated in the workplace. Here are a few of the benefits you might consider offering.

Enhanced Pension Scheme

One of the most common benefits that employers can offer their staff is an enhanced pension schemed as part of their employment offer. As of April 2019, the minimum amount that employees can contribute to their pension has been increased to a 5% contribution and an additional minimum contribution of 3% by employers.

However, some organisations offer an equal entry scheme. This means if the employee is opting to give over 5% of their monthly salary towards their pension, then the organisation will match that contribution. In some cases, certain workplaces will go further still and will up the contributions from anywhere between 5-7.5% per month provided they are matched on both ends.

By participating in a scheme like this, employers begin to send the message that they care about their employees and wish them well in the future.

Health and Dental Cover

In the UK, everyone is entitled to universal health care under the NHS. However, some companies go one step further by providing their employees with business-wide health insurance. With this benefit, employees can rest assured that should they fall ill, or begin to struggle with mental health problems, they will receive private, top-level care under their company policy. This way, they can avoid waiting lists and be back at work faster., as well as keeping a piece of mind that they are getting fast diagnosis and treatment.

This is also pivotal when it comes to mental health, which if left untreated, can have a detrimental effect on your employee's performance at work. To put that in perspective, with the 1 in 4 statistics applied that could mean in a business of 40, ten people could be suffering mental health difficulties, and ultimately, underperforming.

A perk like this is going to be a big plus with any current or potential employee and, on the flip side, you get to stop poor health from stopping your business.

The same goes for dental care. One of the most significant medical costs in the UK is dental care, with many people opting to not receive dental treatment because of the price. If companies are able, and willing, to add a form of dental insurance to their healthcare cover, it would almost certainly put them in good favour with employees.

Wellness Benefits

These types of benefits are more common and easier to implement than some of the more intensive benefits on this list, but they are also some of the most popular with employees. They could be any number of incentives that employers feel will benefit the employee's overall health and wellbeing, and make their working life more enjoyable.

Things like complementary or reimbursed gym memberships and cycle to work schemes are proven to benefit overall employee wellbeing and morale. Even things like relaxation classes and weekly massages can help with the employee's mental wellbeing.

Another engaging option is organizing company wellness challenges, which encourage friendly competition and team bonding while promoting healthy habits across the organization.

Flexible Working Hours

Flexible working hours would be a good option that employers can implement without any real cost to the company. Allowing fully, or partly flexible working hours will allow employees to feel a greater sense of control over their work life but won’t cost the employer anything.

This allows the employee to have more time for meeting personal and family needs, allow them greater working freedom and more control to arrange their schedule in a way that suits them and will enable them to be most productive.