This week we have a guest post from William Annison, an Employee Benefits Advisor for HWWA Consulting Ltd. William explains the importance of clarifying company benefits to your employees.
Many employees simply forget or are unaware of the benefits that are being provided by their employer. I’ve come across many employees who have inadvertently bought things like income protection or additional life insurance when their employer provides these types of cover for them as part of their contract. In my experience, you can never tell your employees too often or provide them with too many reminders about the benefits on top of salary that they are entitled to as an employee.
Learn more: Which benefits and perks do employees want most post-pandemic?
Posting an online summary that can be accessed whenever an employee needs to can help you to reduce the number of questions you receive about what benefits the company can offer. Providing enough relevant information and then promoting this to employees can help to clarify. I have found that employees' questions usually relate to changes going on in their lives, and so are infrequent but often require an urgent answer. This can be the case when someone is getting married, is applying for a mortgage, or needs to claim on a medical insurance policy.
So for example, if you provide life insurance for your employees (Death in Service) then you might want to list the basic points online, set out in a similar way to the following. Doing so should provide enough information to satisfy most questions:
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Life Assurance (for employees only) |
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It is also important to provide some kind of monetary value for the benefit being offered. The grass often looks greener when employees compare similar roles at other employers and it is at this point that clear, easily accessible information can help to save you money by retaining valued employees.
If your employees fully understand what you offer, they are more likely to look for comparable benefits from another employer and in many cases realise that their current ‘deal’ is a lot better than they first thought.
Users of myhrtoolkit need not worry about how to communicate company benefits to employees. Myhrtoolkit provides a pay & benefits feature, which allows you to upload company benefits and allocate them to staff members. Employees can then access this information whenever they need.
Find out more about how our pay and benefits management software can help your small business.
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