Guest post by Zoe Price
If you want skilled staff, you’re going to have to offer skilled people a fair deal. The old adage goes that you get what you pay for in this world, and that goes for employees too. They are likely to be pursued or pursuing multiple job opportunities, or even very fine where they are but just looking. You’ll need to give them a good reason to come to you. What are those reasons? Well, we have a few suggestions that will help you attract and keep the skilled employees in your organisation.
Days off
A big benefit is the number of holiday days you offer your employees. Nothing says “You will be worked to the bone” like a tiny sum of holidays. However, even if you do on principle offer the minimum number of holiday days, you can make that feel better to the employee by offering a few extra. For example, people are starting to just offer your birthday off, which should be appealing simply so you don’t have to sit through another chorus of “Happy Birthday” from the mail guy you said “hi” to once.
You can also consider offering an extra day of holidays after two years with the company, limited to 30 days. This will encourage employees to stick around for the benefits for a number of years. The thing is, keeping track of all these benefits can be a bit confusing for the manager or HR ref that needs to juggle them all. If that sounds like a problem, you can use a software solution like zestbenefits.com, where you can manage your entire team’s benefits from one place and send them updates and notifications.
Special days
You can also suggest special days where your employees aren’t off to do their own thing, but it’s also not a full day of staying on the grind. Like offering a Christmas shopping afternoon to make the holidays easier, because the weekends at Christmas are painful. Charity days will allow the entire staff to come together behind a good cause. Or you could arrange a little lunch every quarter to simply catch up and team build rather than talking about work – again.
And then there are more substantial things, like duvet days. Some call it a mental health day, but that’s not necessarily any of your boss/manager’s business, so it has been renamed. And that is, after all, the point: that no questions are asked of a duvet day. You need that day off, you take that day off. Recruiting agents suggest three a year.
Remote working
Since lockdown, the concept of working from home has taken off and hasn’t really been let go of. Employees are seeing better work/life balance and employers are seeing more production. So, it’s no surprise that you’ll hear jobseekers are outright vetoing jobs that don’t have flexible, hybrid, or remote working as an option. Other companies are also looking at a 4-day working week, which is also said to do wonders for work/life balance. And for the people who want to see the world, there is the working from anywhere policy, where you can take extra time on holiday and work abroad.
Commuting
Commuting is never fun – hence the appreciation for working from home. But you can make it a bit easier. Consider offering a car allowance or a company car, or even set up a car pool so that your employees have the benefit of not shilling out for gas and the planet get the benefit of less emissions in the world. Another idea is to offer subsidised parking.
