With budgets for salary increases tight, now is the time to promote employee benefits
It is remuneration review season for many Australian businesses and with cost of living still a major issue for many employees, the pressure is on to deliver salary increases.
But with companies facing tight margins and rising operating costs, delivering on expectations is likely to lead to some difficult conversations.
Managing director, APAC at Reward Gateway, Kylie Green, believes better promotion of employment benefts is “crucial” to show how businesses support employees beyond pay.
“Lot of employees are under pressure around the cost of living, and we see in the media daily updates around the impact on individuals, whether it's mortgage pressure, pressure with the cost of electricity, the cost of groceries,” she told HRD.
“I think that's where organisations can do a really good job of packaging and promoting the ways that they could support financial wellbeing, because salary is only one of many ways that many organisations [offer] support on that.“
Green said this could include highlighting discount programs with offers on essential items such as groceries, electricity bills and petrol and importantly, benefits that extend to family members.
"One way that we've seen employers do that really well is to highlight the early adopters and showcase from a trusted colleague the way that they're leveraging and supporting the extension of their disposable income; not just for them but for their whole family,” she said.
“The other thing that we're seeing is providing communication that goes to the home because it's a family-wide benefit that they can access and families are key influencers in employment decision.
Green said awareness of the full range employee benefits was often quite low and this could leave HR and people and culture teams "disheartened" during employee engagement surveys.
"They've invested a lot in their initiatives, but the awareness may not be there and so they are not fully leveraging the benefits they get,” she said.
“Equally as important as the range of benefits you have is actually the communication tools to make sure there's awareness among your employees about what they can have access to, not only at time of introduction."
What work benefits do employees want?
With an increasing age range of employees, there is expectations on employers to provide benefits for a much broader demographic, and this is leading to increased focus on personalisation of benefits and rewards, according to Green.
“I think one of the things that a lot of employers are shifting to is a much broader selection of benefits with the ability for employees to self-select,” she said.
“We find that people very frequently are having changes in their life circumstances that mean that what is important to them will adjust, and one of the major things people are looking for is flexibility from their employer to be able to support them on something very personalised and very meaningful.”
Green said employers doing this well were taking a bigger picture view a total rewards and giving a breadth of choice and then allowing employees to self-select what was meaningful and relevant.
Green said increasingly benefits were stretching to support the personal lives of employees, which could create a greater connection and trust between employers and employees.
“I think nowadays there's … an understanding that we are asking people to bring their whole selves to work, and one of the elements of that is a deeper support of all of the areas that impact employees at different life stages,” she said.
"A lot of employers nowadays are providing access to further financial wellbeing support, they're also providing access to further psychological support, which is really important with psychological safety at work and a lot of the pressure that employees are under.
"I think it's really important when we think about the pressure employees are feeling when they have a time of trauma or distress in their family, and that they have access to tools that can help them to support their loved ones as well, so that’s definitely a big communication piece that I think sometimes I missing."
