7 Must-Have Employee Benefits For Your Remote Workforce
The trend of remote working has grown massively amongst working professionals during the past decade. With the introduction of cloud technology, one could do their work while staying away from their workplace. Or let's say they could make anyplace they deem fit their workplace. This has come in very handy as the whole world is now fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ongoing pandemic has caused countries to go into a state of lockdown, hindering the normal functioning of our society. With social distancing and self-isolation being the only possible measures to overcome this situation, everyone is locked inside their own home. As such, businesses are left with no choice but to allow their employees to work from home.
The role of employers doesn't just end here. When employees are working from home, it's a different scene. Even at home, your employees will be facing a lot more distractions than their office environment. At times, it becomes challenging for them to stay engaged. And this is something that employers must look into to keep their workforce working from home motivated and satisfied.
Speaking of a solution, one way here is by introducing some really awesome employee benefits for your remote workforce. Offering fringe benefits has been a very effective way that organizations have implemented for a long time to keep their workers satisfied. Moreover, employees now seek better benefits compared to a handsome paycheck.
Hence, I bring you some of the best employee benefits you can consider for all your employees working from home or elsewhere.
Let’s begin
The 7 Note-worthy Employee Benefits for Remote Workers
1. Subsidized Insurance Plans
Having an insurance plan has become one of the priorities of every modern-day working professional. It provides a sense of financial security to your employees, which is very important today. However, most employees purchase several insurance plans to secure their various assets, including their family's future. And this is where it starts getting tricky as these plans often end up costing more than your employees could manage. Hence, as a responsible employer, you can help your employees by facilitating them with subsidized insurance plans.
Several companies out in the market provide insurance plans at discounted rates exclusively for corporate employees. Such discount plans are also offered by employee benefits companies like Vantage Circle who take care of your entire employee benefits program.
2. Workstation Support
Every employee aspires to work with the best equipment in hand no matter if they are at the office or working remotely. When they have access to all the amenities for getting the work done, it fuels their motivation to be more productive and give better results. It also makes them feel comfortable by creating a good vibe around and instilling a sense of responsibility.
So, here you can support your employees by providing them with various hardware and other resources that they might need for setting up their home workstation.
You can also plan to reimburse employees for managing their work from home setup, including connectivity charges and maintenance allowances every month.
3. Learning and Development Opportunities
Learning and development opportunities have always been at the forefront of effective employee benefits. Employees these days are more curious about learning new technologies, enhance their skills and grow professionally. When they are allowed to quench their thirst for knowledge while working simultaneously, they feel obliged. Also, the availability of online courses has now made things way more accessible for anyone to learn anything. And you can too provide your employees with access to premium online courseware on any topic they wish to learn.
4. Health and Wellness Benefits
An employee benefits initiative would always be incomplete without including the aspect of health and wellness. Healthy employees are the soul of every successful organization. Moreover, since your employees are already working in isolation, keeping up a healthy lifestyle becomes even more important for staying fit physically and mentally. And one of the best ways to deliver health and wellness to your remote workforce is by using an employee wellness platform.
A platform like this helps employers keep their employees fit and active by assigning them various health tasks every day. Further, to ensure maximum participation, you can incentivize the employees to complete the health challenges and encourage productivity driven by better health.
5. Childcare Benefits
Your employees are definitely going to love it when you extend some benefits for their family members' wellbeing. And the best one here would be providing benefits for your employees' children. When your employees work from home, they might also have to look after their kids at the same time. This ultimately creates a major distraction for your employees. Hence, to relieve your employees, you can provide some childcare benefits like access to professional babysitters or engaging online classes for kids.
6. Access to Home Care Services
Another benefit that would make your employees feel good working for your organization is access to home care services. While your employees work from home, they also need to look after their own homely chores, which could be very distracting and time-consuming. Hence, you can consider facilitating your employees with various domestic care services like meal delivery and laundry to help your remote employees stay engaged at their own jobs.
7. Subscription Benefits
It's one of the best benefits for your remote employees.
Nowadays, various OTT services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc., provide everyone a great way to rejuvenate themselves with some awesome content to binge-watch. Not only this, but you can also opt for getting your employees some other subscriptions like magazines, access to paid online forums, and more.
Wrapping Up
Reading this article, you might have noticed that employee benefits for remote workers are quite different from the regular workplace benefits which employers generally provide.
At the same time, choosing benefits for these employees, you have to be sure about how you're going to deliver them. Also, these benefits have to be very effective and flexible so that your employees can choose what they want. And this is possible with the help of a cloud-based employee benefits platform.
Having such a platform makes it easier for organizations to offer various employee benefits irrespective of the workforce's size or locations. On the other hand, it also enables the employees to pick their own benefits which they would like to avail from various brands and other services.
If you would like to share anything on how employers can support their remote workers with better benefits, please share your comments below.
Vantage Circle is a simple AI-powered Rewards & Recognition Platform for upgrading your employee experience and engagement for better productivity.