Employee Must-Have Benefits: Revamping the Old, Adding the New

Traditional benefits have focused on retirement plans as well as life and health insurance. These are important employee benefits because many workers would not be able to afford them otherwise. However, times have changed, and employers must change with them if they want to be competitive in the labor market. Benefits management is critical because employee well-being is a critical business need. Without it, your organization will suffer.

These days, traditional benefits are considered de rigueur. To stand out, employers must go well beyond the traditional package. However, recognize that traditional and non-traditional benefits are not mutually exclusive. To present a progressive package, you can freshen up traditional benefits with new components, as well as augment them with new options.

Broaden Medical Coverage

For a couple of decades, the focus on health plans was to make them more affordable for both employers and their workers. Today, the focus is on expanding healthcare coverage in both form and reach. Consider the following options:

• Cover both workers and their dependents, including:
  • Married and unmarried domestic partners
  •  LGBTQ+ families
• Offer coverage for fertility treatments, adoption, surrogacy, and other options to help workers start or expand their family
  • Ensure these benefits are available to all workers, not just heterosexual couples
• Include gender-affirming care
• Offer financial support for workers who must travel to another state to access reproductive care
• To be inclusive, your plan network should include providers who meet various needs, such as:
  • Those familiar with LGBTQ+ care
  • Bilingual providers
  • Providers that look like your workers
  • Providers that share the same background
• Mental healthcare access and affordability

Be aware that access to affordable mental healthcare is critical for all employees, but especially those who belong to diverse groups. Even if your company has built a diverse and inclusive workplace, employees may experience unconscious bias, exclusion, and overt discrimination out there in the rest of the world. Offering expanded benefits that address inclusion goals help your employees feel that work is a safe space for them.

Wellness Programs

Wellness programs continue to expand, offering a wide range of benefits from smoking cessation and weight loss programs to yoga and meditation apps, to fitness center memberships. However, consider that these programs could be analogous to putting a Band-Aid on a heart attack. What may be more impactful is to identify and initiate company-wide systemic measures designed to eliminate sources of employee stress.

Paid Parental Time Off

Parental leave is a traditional benefit protected by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which offers certain workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year. There are three ways to update this benefit. The first is to offer a fixed amount of paid maternity leave so that new mothers do not have to use up all their vacation time to stay home with their newborn or adopted child. The second way is to offer a certain amount of paid or unpaid leave for fathers to bond with new children and help around the household. And finally, consider creating a gender-neutral parental leave policy to include LGBTQ+ couples.

Financial Benefits

Traditional financial benefits call for competitive compensation and a retirement plan. New, non-traditional benefits should recognize the financial challenges specific workers face and offer impactful solutions. For example:

• Divert matched paycheck income into a liquid emergency fund or college savings fund
• Facilitate access to low-interest rate mortgage loans
• Host college and retirement planning seminars
• Offer free access to experienced financial/investment/legal advisors
• Enable faster access to pay than every two weeks

Floating Holiday Model

There are no federal laws that mandate employers offer paid holidays. Even so, most companies have a full slate of paid holidays, including Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Independence Day. However, your workers might prefer selecting their own paid holidays, such as a family birthday, the day after the Super Bowl, or two days before Christmas to spend with in-laws. While you may still want to close up shop on the big holidays – Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day – the floating holiday model allows you to stay open the rest of the year with staff who would rather choose their own paid holidays to better accommodate personal celebrations.

Nontraditional Benefits

Stay abreast of new benefit trends but be aware that not every type of benefit will work for every employer. For example, the Silicon Valley trend for unlimited paid time off (PTO) will not work for many organizations. Before implementing new benefits, consider any unintended consequences.

With that said, do not be reluctant to explore new benefit options, including the following.

Flexible Work Options

Remote work and hybrid schedules have proven to be one of the most highly- coveted benefits in recent years, with many workers swearing they will never return to the office environment. Fortunately, a significant body of research supports the idea that most workers tend to be as productive if not more so working from a remote location. The bonus is that it helps them also achieve a better work-life balance.

Another enhancement employers can add is flexible work hours. In many cases, this means working earlier, later, or variable hours in order to accommodate a partner’s schedule and/or childcare needs. Also consider giving workers the ability to compress their 40-hour workweek into four days instead of five. With these flexible options, you may even impose certain requirements, such as mandating they spend at least two days a week in the office or be available from 10am to noon for a meeting window every day.

Additional PTO

PTO is one of those benefits that is not always used each year by the entire workforce. According to Pew Research Center, nearly half (46 percent) of American workers do not use all their PTO during the year. If this is the case, there may be little risk in offering more. Note that for some workers, this perk means they would not have to cut back vacation plans for ad hoc medical appointments, daycare closures, to attend a child’s after-school activity, or jury duty.

Caregiver benefits

More workers are taking on caregiving duties, whether for children or elderly relatives or both. Adding new benefits, such as reimbursing paid caregiver expenses or offering flextime for unexpected situations, help reduce worker stress and reinforce the value of company benefits.

Culture Defines Benefit Usage

It’s one thing to offer generous PTO and paid parental leave, yet another for workers to feel they can take full advantage of these benefits. In some companies, supervisors inadvertently or purposely discourage workers from taking time off – which they have technically accrued – because it would put a workload strain on the department.

To eliminate this pressure not to take benefits, consider ways to empower middle management to help address their issues. For example, cross train coworkers to better fill in when colleagues are out, hire temp workers, bring in retirees or part-timers to fill the void. Most importantly, train managers to encourage direct reports to take full advantage of benefits offered, approve time off when requested, and augment departmental resources when needed so that the burden doesn’t fall on co-workers.

In fact, HR can support this cultural change by monitoring benefits utilization and holding leaders accountable for team members not taking time off. Over the long run, this initiative can help improve morale without sacrificing productivity.

Know Your Workforce

If you don’t know what mix of traditional and non-traditional benefits your workforce would prefer, just ask. Brief, specific surveys can help garner the data you need while making workers feel they have a voice in the workplace.

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