As an employer, you are constantly looking for ways to enhance productivity, retain top talent, and cultivate a work environment for innovative ideas to be born. Providing a fun, healthy, and wholesome workplace for your employees has been proven to boost team morale. In addition, providing your employees benefits ensures a motivated workforce and improves the work culture. Not only do your employees feel appreciated, they are also incentivized to perform well. Aside from benefits such as unlimited PTO or flexible remote schedule, offering additional perks at work including complimentary meals and fitness memberships increases employee satisfaction. These extra perks at work are one of the reasons employees enjoy a job and tend to stay longer than at workplaces with no work culture. Lets dive into the realm of work perks to understand their importance at the workplace and what their benefits are.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What are perks at work?
- How Perks at Work Help Work Culture
- Unique Work Perk Ideas for Employers
- Key Benefits to Perks at Work
What are perks at work?
Employee perks are additional benefits provided by your employer beyond your fixed salary and essential employee programs (think your insurance plan). These perks could be as small as providing free breakfast to reimbursing educational courses or even as grand as having an onsite gym. Employers can even organize offsite events to promote workplace culture and increase productivity. There’s no limit to what work perks can look like so it gives employers room for creativity and uniqueness.
What is an example of a perk at work?
Perks at work vary, depending on the company, workplace culture, and even industry. Offering perks is one way employers can leverage a competitive advantage over other companies. It attracts top while retaining your best employees. Some companies offer:
- Gym memberships or studio classes
- Exclusive discounts to popular stores
- Wellness programs including spa treatments, recreational sports, and fitness challenges or medical screenings
How Perks at Work Help Work Culture
Research showed employee retention dropped from 46% over a three-year period. In recent years, employers are having a hard time retaining their talent. However, to combat high turnover rates, companies that provide employee perks have seen retention rates increase over the long term. Additionally, work perks help improve the workplace environment and show that employers genuinely care about their workforce. Employee wellness and satisfaction are fundamental aspects of any business. Therefore, showing recognition and offering perks at work is what set a positive and rewarding work culture.
Moreover, perks at work are particularly helpful to boost morale with remote teams. As it can be difficult to improve employee satisfaction with work from home employees, however, providing them fun perks can help create a healthy company culture virtually. Particularly, by offering flexible work hours and ensuring current and new employees feel valued.
Paid time off for volunteering is a common perk that enhances employee engagement. Moreover, studies have shown that high employee engagement benefits the overall success of the company. Therefore, providing unique perks at work provides numerous advantageous including higher retention rates, increase productivity, and improved business performance.
Unique Work Perk Ideas for Employers
To stand out as an employer, you’ll need to provide your employees with unique perks to in order to have a competitive advantage over similar businesses.
Additionally, you can create competitions and reward your high performance individuals with awards or additional benefits. These awards could act as great employee perks including cooking classes or something fancier, private chef experiences. Some ideas for unique perks at work are:
- Top Golf events
- Free food such as breakfast or vouchers to redeem for lunch
- Language classes
- Amusement or theme park tickets
- Escape room experiences
- Vacation packages like all-inclusive luxury resorts and cruises
Wellness perks
Employers can think of perks by category or by specific aspects of life. An increasingly more popular perk is wellness programs. Mainly to promote work life balance and healthier employee well being. This includes offering meditation rooms in the office, an on site gym, and access to wellness professionals such as masseuses, nutritionist visits, and more.
Personal development
Employers allowing employees to deepen their skills, further their education, or provide access to online classes. Online platforms such as Cousera is a great way to let employees work on their own personal development. Providing this free resource would encourage employees to not only focus on their professional development, but sharpen their interests outside of work. In addition, employers should also consider tuition reimbursement. Where their employees pay upfront and once they’ve achieved their degree or certificate, the company reimburses them.
Sporting event perks
An easy perk that works for everyone is providing sporting event tickets for employees and their families. This is great for families with young children and sport fans alike. It also creates a sense of belonging and community which contributes to employees’ well-being. It could also act as a team bonding event with the goal of creating a tighter knit team.
Employee Discount Perks
Nothing beats using local employees coupons! Saving money allows employees to have more autonomy over their disposable income. Typically, businesses can partner up with local stores to get their employees exclusive discounts. Ultimately, allowing their employees to spend less while shopping for essentials.
What Are the Key Benefits of Perks at Work?
Happy and satisfied employees increase productivity and overall company performance. One way employers can increase employee satisfaction is by offering employee perks. There are different ways you can set up perks at your company, a common one is rewarding high performers. In fact, recognition is the third thing that people need in their job search. So incorporating perks at work to reward high performers incentivizes employees while giving them the recognition they deserve. Additional benefits include:
- Low employee turnover rate
- Attract top talent
- Increase productivity and motivation
- Improve employee engagement and satisfaction
- Work life balance
