Engaged, happy and motivated employees are the key to a successful business. Without them, all the ambition and excitement around your revolutionary idea is for nothing. One of the best ways to keep your team in this state of mind is innovative work perks.
Work perks have quickly become a key part of attracting the best applicants, negotiating a contract and keeping key staff. You can’t afford to phone it in with work perks though, they need to show thought and consideration for the person you’re offering them to. Here’s why the best way to keep your team positive and productive is through innovative, role-specific work perks.
They show you care
Blanket benefits for the whole office are nice, but they may not suit everyone in your team. Using these more generic perks gives the impression to your team that you’re only thinking of a few members of staff and not taking individual needs into account.
Individual, role-specific work perks show you care enough to spend more than a couple of minutes Googling ‘best work perks’ and actually put some thought into the process of deciding what benefits you are going to implement. For example, if you introduce a food-related perk and don’t offer vegan options, you’re not showing proper consideration for all of your staff. Making the perks you choose specific to the role and the person in it make sure these problems don’t arise.
Showing you care is about more than just the individual, it’s about helping the people important to them. SAS is one of a few companies offering the unique perk of offering a college scholarship program for the children of employees. There’s a lot more consideration there than casual Fridays can offer.
These kinds of perks show you value the person and understand how they form it. It’s not about special treatment, as everyone gets their own particular perk. One of the biggest things employees are looking for from their boss is recognition, and these kinds of perks are the perfect indication they matter to you.
They improve staff’s ability to do their job
Work perks aren’t just about the benefits employees receive outside of work hours, they should help improve your staff’s ability to excel in their jobs. Think about how your perks can make things easier for the team’s day to day activities.
While a lot of employees crave extra days off and something to entertain themselves within the office, a lot are actually looking for ways t streamline their tasks and find time for themselves to excel and experiment with new methods.
Think about the most difficult aspects of your employee’s jobs and how certain perks could improve them. For example, if you run a company that has a large fleet of drivers, how they pay for fuel can reak havoc on your finance department when expenses and receipts are processed. In this scenario, a fuel card from a supplier like iCompario could massively streamline the process by putting all fuel payments onto one card and moving all receipts onto a digital platform.
Try and replicate this kind of personal improvement on your employee’s ability to work and you may even end up surprised about by the innovations and advancements they make with the extra time they have.
They show you listen to feedback
Proper feedback sessions are an essential part of running a modern business. You can no longer decide 100% what goes and what’s best, there needs to be some input from the staff. One of the best ways to show you’re listening is to implement perks that match their feedback requests.
Like showing you care, it’s a way of making a change that affects the performance of the individual. Launching a new perk that has been specifically asked for by the person in that role will let the employee know they’re heard. You’re showing that the role is about the individual, and you’re not trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Who knows what that role needs better than the person who is doing it every day?
This makes your office a place where the staff feel comfortable coming to you with suggestions and ideas, not just for perks, but elements of the business. It can make the environment much more comfortable and establish a workplace where ideas are taken seriously and not passed off unless they come from a senior member of staff. Think about implementing survey tools like 15Five to gauge what your employees enjoy and are looking for.
They react to modern needs
The requirements of work perks have changed dramatically in the last few years. Many jobs are not offering the financial support or security that people need, so work perks need to balance out their ability to live their lives and support their families. This doesn’t just mean implementing blanket flexi-work though, it means understanding the individual needs of your employees and their struggles.
Flexi-work is a good start, but if the staff member needs to be on call for certain tasks late at night they should be provided with the right equipment at home too. Likewise, if they are working at awkward times you need to offer child care and the option to take off days at shorter notice to spend time with their families.
Work perks shouldn’t be done just for the sake of it, you’re trying to make your staff’s lives better and bring balance to their role. This is why we’ve seen wellness perks become so prominent in recent years, they speak to the need of the individual, modern staff member.
When you plan your next round of work perks you need to think outside the traditional ideas and get inventive for that specific role. Encourage your employees to offer ideas and observe the obstacles they’re experiencing in their jobs to make things better for both of you. Inspiration for role-specific perks is all around you.
