Basic Benefits to Keep Your Employees Happy and Productive

For most employees, the employee benefits offered by employers are just as important as the salary. This is the case if medical insurance is offered for the worker and even his or her family. While benefits for workers aren’t cheap, they can certainly result in attracting top employees who will remain productive and happy in the workplace. Let’s take a look at some of the basic employee benefits employers should legally be offering.

Medical Insurance

This is one of the most basic benefits for full-time employees. Medical insurance may or may not include dental and vision benefits. Typically, both the employer and the worker contribute to the insurance payments.

Life Insurance

The basic life insurance benefit offered by employers should be equal to the employee’s annual salary. Employees should be given the option of purchasing additional insurance if they desire.

Disability Insurance

Depending on type of employment, employee benefits for disability range between half to a third of their pre-disability income. The benefits usually cover partial to total disability and benefits are paid over a certain time period which is normally between three to six months after the start of the disability.

Retirement Benefits

Employers should offer retirement plans to which employees contribute a percentage of their salary. The employer can choose to match these amounts and can also offer pension plans.

Vacation Time

Paid vacation time is one of the most basic employee benefits. The amount of paid time usually depends on how long the employee has worked for the company. Vacation hours accrue over a fixed number of working hours.

Family or Compassionate Leave

Employees, by law, are allowed a certain amount of weeks of unpaid leave with job protection. Such instances include the birth of a child, care of a spouse or parent or caring for a child with a serious medical condition.

Sick Leave

Sick leave varies depending on part time or full time employment. Six leaves are typically set per the number of months the employee has worked in the case of full-time employment. For part time employees, the days may be based on the number of hours worked in a calendar year.

Recruitment or Joining Bonus

This is another of the basic employee benefits that offers return to both the company and the employee. What happens is the company offers a lump sum to the employee for joining the organisation. Usually the bonus is a variable of the worker’s basic salary. This is an optional benefit employers can offer. You can also provide anew employee welcome boxfor your new hires on the day of their onboarding.

Referral Bonus

Instead of spending money on recruitment agencies, many companies offer referral bonuses to employees when they refer their friends for openings in the company.

Options for Working Hours or Flexi-Time

This is a fairly new employee benefit. Employees are offered options of working from home or choosing suitable working hours. Such a benefit allows workers who have some constraints to offer value to the company, without which, valuable employees may just seek work elsewhere. For example, if a worker has young children to look after they’d probably prefer to work from home instead of spending time commuting in traffic and leaving the child in day care. Some companies even choose to offer day care facilities at the office.

These are just some of the legally required basic employee benefits that help to ensure employees are happy and productive. Some companies choose to go the extra mile and offer allowance for daily meals; fuel allowances; mobile phone allowances; free snacks and beverages; free duvet days and more to ensure that their valued employees feel taken care of and happy to work where they do.