How to care for, connect with and celebrate your employees, no matter where they are or what they want
We live in a new age of work. HR leaders globally grapple with a unique set of challenges, brought about, or accelerated, by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The reality is: Employees’ needs and wants have changed and businesses need to adapt so that they can attract and retain top talent. This means boosting engagement in a new hybrid world where bringing everyone together is more important than ever.
Let’s have a look at some of these top challenges, what needs to be done to address them and how having the right tools in place can help achieve this, no matter where a company’s workforce is in the world.
What are the key challenges businesses are facing right now with their workforce?
The top 3 most pressing challenges for HR today are:
1. Focussing on employees wellbeing and mental health
The stress of homeschooling/remote working/returning to work/uncertainty of tomorrow has brought on the need to provide better mental health and wellbeing support to all employees.
Poor mental health is responsible for 72 million working days lost and costs $34.9 billion each year1. Plus, employees now expect their companies to be totally committed to their physical, mental and financial wellbeing.
2. Harmonising across a global or dispersed workforce, bringing cultural alignment no matter where employees are
Having a unified employee value proposition (EVP) across multiple locations, brands, teams and countries is not a nice to have anymore – it is a must have.
Whether companies are looking at hiring across borders or catering for a hybrid/remote environment, bringing together their benefits and rewards to more distributed workforces across locations is the key to ensuring parity of benefits and cultural alignment throughout the business. This can be a drain on HR resource though in terms of time (juggling multiple vendors, dealing with complex regulations), money (having complicated plans or inefficient spend) and energy (managing multiple platforms means a heavier admin burden).
On top of this, hybrid and remote working are making it more difficult to create a clear and attractive organisational culture across multiple locations at a time when it matters the most – 74% of employees have the feeling they are missing out on company news2.
3. Offering something meaningful to every employee
Employees have always had different needs and wants. But what’s changed is that these have evolved. Having the occasional team lunch out or Friday evening drinks in the office may not be as appealing to your employees anymore as discounts on groceries and entertainment, workout videos or mindfulness apps are. Every employee will value different things so having a blanket approach for all your workforce no longer works. It’s never been more important to offer benefits that cater for everyone.
75% of employees say they’re more likely to stay in their jobs because of their employee benefits package3 while 60% of people report that benefits and perks are a major factor in considering whether to accept a job offer4. It’s not all about the benefits though: Employees want to feel valued as individuals. 63% of employees who are recognised are very unlikely to look for a new job5.
How can businesses address these challenges?
Employers need to harmonise their employee experience, no matter where their workforce is around the world, and provide tailored wellbeing, recognition and engagement offerings that address each individual's needs.
Done well, the efforts are worth it:
- 89% of workers at companies that support wellbeing initiatives are more likely to recommend their company as a good place to work6
- 60% of best-in-class organisations stated that employee recognition is extremely valuable in driving individual performance7
- Employee productivity increases by 20 to 25% in organisations where employees are connected8
- 69% of employees say a better benefits package would make them choose one company over another9
How can Perkbox help?
The new Perkbox platform enables leaders to tackle these challenges by harmonising their employee experience across any market, ensuring bespoke wellbeing, recognition and engagement that cater for today’s global workforce yet remain relevant to each individual.
Perkbox is a global benefits and rewards platform that allows companies to care for, connect with and celebrate their employees, no matter where they are or what they want. We ensure that companies with a complex global workforce can still have a harmonised EVP and culture, while keeping each employee happy, healthy and motivated.
By bringing all key people initiatives into one central platform, available on desktop or via our app, employers can save a significant amount of time and money, while also providing a seamless experience for their people.
"We are excited to bring our new platform to market – it’s a platform that has truly been built with our customers at the heart of the development process through deep discussion and listening to what today's challenges are. With this new platform we will be able to help our customers address their most important challenges: that of harmonising their benefits strategy, providing something of value to everyone, fostering cultural alignment and ensuring their employees are motivated and healthy. And uniquely, we can do so for a variety of organisations, including global or remote organisations"
Gautam Sahgal, CEO, Perkbox
The Perkbox platform is structured around four core hubs:
Wellness hub
Support your team's wellbeing with curated resources at their fingertips.
Help your teams be happier and healthier, with a wide range of carefully curated wellbeing content – including meditation guides, videos workouts, soothing sleep stories – to support their physical, mental and financial wellbeing.
These cater for all your employees’ needs whether they’re looking to exercise, calm their mind or get a better night’s sleep. The great thing is: not only is this content available on the go, it also provides a completely ad and interruption free experience. Emphasising your company's focus on wellbeing will boost your ability to attract and retain top talent as well as increase productivity and reduce absenteeism.
Perks hub
Provide global perks and benefits that constantly add value to your employees’ lives, all in one easy to manage place.
Make your business stand out with perks, benefits and discounts that suit your employees’ needs and lifestyles. There’s something for everyone – no matter where they are or what they want.
Your employees can choose from over 1,000 deals and discounts from the biggest brands across the globe, allowing them to shop and save all year round. You can also give them more freedom to choose perks that matter to them: with a monthly allowance of Flexi points, employees can spend their points on a wide range of Flexi Perks – at no cost to them – from a coffee to music subscriptions.
Last but not least, bringing all your other/custom/company/third party benefits together in one place – big or small – makes it simple for employees to find what they need, whenever they need it.
Celebration hub
Recognise and reward your people in a personalised way, wherever they are – increasing motivation and engagement.
Celebrate your people’s achievements to strengthen relationships and create a long-term culture of appreciation through personalised recognition and reward.
Celebration hub enables company-wide recognition, across borders so anybody in your business can shout out to their colleagues about special achievements, milestones and the people behind them, regardless of their physical location. They can link recognitions to specific values and milestones too, emphasising what your company stands for. Making rewards meaningful and personalised couldn't be easier, with the options of either choosing from a variety of existing rewards or creating your own custom rewards (which don’t always have to be monetary in value).
You can also start a poll and get your employees involved, whether you’re looking to start a healthy competition or simply have some fun! The bottom line is happy and motivated employees are more productive and stay around longer.
Culture hub
Showcase your company updates and culture across locations from one central place.
Create a greater sense of togetherness across all parts of the business. Culture hub enables you to share anything you want with custom cards, from people initiatives to new policies to fun videos. With all the information in one place and easily accessible even on the go via our mobile app, it provides one source of the truth for everyone, creating greater cultural alignment and giving clarity to your workforce, regardless of their team or region. This saves you time and reduces reliance on leaders in each location to cascade information.
All of these are supported by an enhanced admin experience. The Perkbox platform integrates seamlessly with existing single sign on (SSO) and human resources information systems (HRIS), allowing you to harmonise your EVP across locations while minimising admin burden – saving you time, energy and money.
“With a global platform which manages their employees’ benefits, rewards and wellbeing all over the world, we provide our HR decision-makers and admins a product that is customisable, easy to manage and draw industry insights. To our merchants on the platform, we provide a global user base which is engaged and consuming their products on a repeat basis. What makes us different from other online rewards platforms is that we are inherently global and have a strong network effect built in to engage our users and bring them back organically to use our platform. While there are many perks and reward platforms out there, we are unmatched in our global offering and how our products seamlessly connect and make life easy for both HR decision-makers and employees.”
Ankur Sharma, VP of Product and Engineering, Perkbox
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