The COVID19 Effect on Workplace Benefits Has Been Revealed

You may have been using benefits to boost your employees' morale, engagement, retention, and satisfaction. However, COVID happened, and things have changed, such that your employees may now be needing benefits you are not aware of.

Today, your competitor could be using benefits management systems, such as UK & global HR software, to handle their trending benefits management programme. HR technology streamlines how you open enrollment to make employees reduce the HR burden by being able to edit and update or perform any other task at their leisure. Some of the benefits to look out for include paid time off, parental leave, health insurance, and many more.

To find out about workplace benefits post COVID and debunk such benefits that employees are no longer interested in, Cezanne HR conducted a survey on 750 employees in the UK. What do employees want? Let's find out.

Your Employees Are Prioritising Benefits Not Tying Them to Office

Diversity is important in business in any aspect, meaning you should not operate a one-way benefits system. You want a benefits system that meets the needs of your diverse employees if you want to retain your best talents and increase engagement.

The latest survey shows that employees are less inclined with social benefits compared to 2018. Your employees now seek healthcare and insurance benefits considering the pressure COVID brings.

Enhanced leave has also moved from 8th to 1st position in 2021. Following this trend, if your organisation focuses on employee socials such as the middle and end of the party, you may have to change the focus to save cost because employees would not be satisfied since it is not the benefits they want. You want to use the money for arranging staff parties for benefits like healthcare and insurance plans to satisfy your employees.

Age brackets and gender also factor in employee benefits management. For example, the survey shows men and people of 54+ years prioritise healthcare benefits while women and people between 18 and 24 prioritise enhanced leave as their most preferred benefits.

Apart from ensuring diverse employee benefits, career and succession planning is important for employee engagement. You do not want to lose your talents after the lockdown. Your employees may have thought it wouldn't be smart to change their jobs during the lockdown. However, with the easing lockdown, they could be thinking about new challenges and opportunities. In the report, you can see that career development in 2018 moved from 7th to 3rd in 2021.

Why Employee Benefits Changed Due to COVID

1.    Employee Wellbeing

Most organisations may have looked down on employee wellbeing in the past or did not provide much support for it. However, the pandemic is seeing a change in this aspect with mental health now a topic of concern. SHRM's study shows 42% of employers improved support for employee health and well-being over the last 6 months. Mental health tops the list, meaning more employers are seeing the need to focus on the employees as well instead of being only customer-centric.

2.    Home Office

Pandemic forced many employees to work from home, making it important for many businesses to invest in new benefits that enable employees to keep up with remote work such as home offices. During the pandemic, many companies showed support for newly remote employees and their home offices.

3.    Career Development

More employees are prioritising career development. The reason could be that more employees are looking to adapt to changes in job roles in remote work settings following COVID-19. Organisations can invest in career development benefits to connect the career objectives of employees with their professional training and development opportunities.

4.    Childcare

More parents are having to keep up with online training and work with childcare. Meanwhile, low-income families, most especially, are facing childcare problems, with a report showing a quarter of households with income below 250% of the federal poverty level are doing at least some of their work from home. Employers can consider investing in benefits in this area to relieve affected employees.

How Technology Has Impacted Benefits Management

• Burden relief. HRIS in employee benefit management shares HR responsibility with employees. Your employees can be able to complete certain tasks and make updates without submitting bulky benefits enrollment tasks for HR to handle.
• Reduce paperwork. When you invest in an HRM system in benefits management, such as enrolling in benefits, you automatically cut off paper data entries.
• Mitigate errors. Some seasoned employees can make mistakes when entering data. When entering data manually, an employee can miss a field or forget to save changes. However, HRIS in benefits management can automatically complete fields following already-existing information in the system, saving and updating the data automatically.
• Simplified compliance reporting. Manually performing compliance reporting can be a daunting task. With HR software, you can capture real-time information as they enter or change. Therefore, there would be no need to identify employees who enrolled and then manually enter data for compliance reporting.