Growing Together: Effective Employee Benefit and Incentive Program Ideas For Your Company

Listening to your staff is critical to your company’s success. Sometimes you need to really hear and understand them to get a better sense of what they need and expect from you and your company.

Having insight into your employees’ different needs and behaviors allows you to find and implement solutions that will engage them. When they’re engaged, they perform better and stay loyal to the company. This is exactly what employee benefits are there for – to satisfy your employees’ wants and needs.

There are a lot of benefits that you can provide, but there’s one in particular that might make your entire program a lot more attractive for a workforce consisting of professionals from various age groups – monetary incentives. While health insurance is always important, they might not be as useful for your younger staff who are less at risk of getting sick. Monetary incentives, on the other hand, are benefits everyone could use, as discussed in last week’s blog.

To give you a better idea of how this benefit works, we are sharing a couple of examples of it being implemented in some of our existing clients’ programs:

For one of our longtime clients, the monetary incentives went towards funding the future retirement income of the staff. We opened a mutual funds account, setting aside savings from employees’ monthly paychecks and investing them. The investments will, of course, grow in time. Whatever profit it eventually produces will all be given to the employee when they retire. Doing it this way not only gives them more money to enjoy during retirement but it also reduces some of the expenses of the company.

The decision to implement such a program stemmed from a retention problem within the company. There were always several employees resigning each year. And we could not profile them as they belonged to different age groups. But we knew that the majority of the employees were breadwinners of their respective families. So their income was clearly very important to them.

We figured that if ever something were to happen to the employees, it could affect their ability to make a living. For this reason, we also needed to include life insurance in the program. However, given the company’s retention problem, term life insurance was the most practical option. It’s not only the cheapest, but it also allows employers to immediately stop paying premiums when an employee decides to leave.

We then set up the program itself, finding the best way we could push employees to stay and boost the company’s retention rate. We came up with a seven-year agreement between the company and the employee, consisting of three years of training and four years of work. And if the employee makes it to the eighth year, he/she is finally enrolled in the benefit program and has access to the aforementioned benefits, among others.

Through this example we wanted to show how monetary incentives are flexible and you’re free to customize it in a program that fits your own needs. In this particular client’s case, it was putting it in a retirement savings and paired with term life insurance. It was also implemented in a seven-year program in an effort to maximize the chances of employees staying. This is just one use for it; you can put monetary incentives toward something else and have a shorter time frame for turning it over, if that works for you.

Another client, for instance, created a program where employees receive specific benefits based on how long they’ve stayed in the company. For example, employees who have been with the company for six months receive HMO benefits. If they manage to stay for a full year, they receive a group life insurance rider on top of it. If they stay for five years or more, they’re classified as key employees and get term life insurance, along with everything.

As of writing, we have just implemented a monetary incentives program that will go into retirement planning to go with the HMO and term life benefits that’s already being offered. We will also be delivering a financial literacy seminar to our client’s staff to explain how the program works and help them understand the perks of investing.

Earlier, we mentioned key employees. There are different ways to qualify someone as a key employee. But I personally describe them as the most essential members of a business, so much so that if they leave, it’ll cripple operations. For our client, key employees are those who have stayed for quite some time and in a way proven their loyalty to the company. Again, you’re not stuck with any particular definition; find what works best for you and your company.

What ultimately matters is that you’re engaging your employees with unique benefits that are enough to make them think twice or even thrice about leaving your company. You want them to know that if they ever leave prematurely, whether they’re headed to the same industry or not, they can never enjoy the same add-on benefits. In line with this week’s theme of growing together, you’re not only after staying competitive but also fostering a positive work environment for your team.

Reach out to us to learn more about how these benefit and retirement savings programs can help you and your business.