Over the past few years, employers have found that unless they offer perks to their staff they can’t be competitive when it comes to hiring and retaining top tier talent, which lead to a gold rush of sorts as companies competed to offer the best employee perks.
But as remote work has risen to prominence that has disrupted many established perks, meaning that employers must adjust their employee benefits and perks for the age of telecommuting and work from home. What benefits and perks can you offer employees to keep staff happiness and talent acquisition as high as it can be?
Home Office Set Up/Decoration Stipend
The first great employee perk to offer your remote working staff is a home office set up/decoration stipend. Many remote employees will need to spend some money properly setting up an efficient home office, so offering a small sum of money towards setting up their home office will help attract new remote workers.
Any remote employees who already have a home office set up should still receive some money to keep things fair and avoid any resentment from employees, rather than being used to set up their office they could use this fund to decorate the space, investing in things like office double roller blinds or motivational posters.
Food And Drink Benefits
A popular benefit to offer employees that work in an office, is free food and drink. Whether it’s free lunch every day, a free meal once a month or even just the communal coffee machine that staff can use. Offering free foods and drinks in an office keeps employees in the building and working for longer, making this a win-win perk for employers and employees.
For remote workers it is a tad trickier to give out free food and drink as a staff perk, but there are still things you can do to create a great staff perk. For instance, you could provide your employees a supply of coffee or tea delivered to their home once a month for use during work hours, provide employees with gift cards to use with food delivery services like Deliveroo or you could arrange a work social meal once a month, any of these perks will make your business more attractive to new hires and help build good will with remote employees.
Subsidised Utility Bills
One of the bonuses of the ‘Work From Home’ movement for employers, is that without employees in an office you no longer need to pay for office rent or utility bills for the office, giving your business some reduced overheads and improving your profit margins.
However, the costs of utility bills for the workday are then passed onto employees as their electricity, heating and even internet bills may increase due to working from home. A great perk to offer your employees is some level of utility bill subsidisation, this can be paid from the money saved by not having a company office and the costs associated with that. This perk will help keep your employees positively engaged with the business and will also improve employee retention.
Co-Working Space Allowance
Working alone at home is not the ideal situation for all of your employees, some won’t have the space at home to set up an efficient home office, some may not have the money to kit out a home office (unless you help subsidise that cost) and others may just work more effectively if they are working with other people.
So, offering an allowance for using co-working spaces will be a perk that can help expand your potential talent pool and improve the happiness of your current work from home employees. You can offer to pay for the use of coworking venues partly or entirely, so that your employees can work in the way which best suits them.
Subsidised Gym Memberships
Most work from home and remote jobs are quite sedentary by nature, usually involving spending hours of the day sat at a desk using a computer. When your employees worked in an office, this was slightly offset as employees pop out on their lunch break and commute allowing them to get some movement, but most remote workers will not leave their homes during a working day.
To offset the sedentary nature of your remote employees, work and keep them healthy, you can offer to subsidise gym memberships or the purchase of exercise equipment. This perk will be incredibly popular amongst your staff and allow them to stay healthy despite the sedentary nature of their job. This perk creates an ideal scenario for employers as having staff that are fit and healthy means that there will be less time wasted from ill staff taking sick days.
