Offering employee benefits is necessary for any organization that wants to retain its employees for a long time. However, many employers confuse offering good employee benefits with ‘more’ employee benefits. In their effort to provide maximum employee benefits in their limited budget, they may end up offering some unique but bad employee benefits.
Let’s take a look at some of the bad employee benefits that no employee ever asked for:
Happy Hour at Work
Most employees look forward to happy hours, especially on Fridays, and plan their weekends around. However, drinking with colleagues should always be discouraged. While having one beer while wrapping things up on the weekend may not hurt anyone, things can be rarely kept in control once alcohol enters the scene.
Young employees can especially lean towards drinking more than one beer, and there’s no telling what can happen next. If you don’t want your employees to get loud or naked in the office, ban all alcohol from the workspace. Maintaining professional decorum should be higher on your list than giving your employees an open space to be themselves. While work-friendships can do wonders for the employees’ morale, they can also easily embarrass themselves.
Absence of Dress Code
As much as the absence of an office dress code seems attractive, it can lead to many disasters. While you may be thinking about letting your employees be as comfortable as they want, there is a great chance that you would want to take this employee benefit back. You might think granting this employee benefit will let your employees show up in trendy athleisure, but they might just show up in their pajamas with unwashed hair.
If you want to make your employees comfortable, dedicate Fridays and Wednesdays to smart casuals and keep the rest of the week for them to show up dressed up. Two days per week are enough for employees to wear their favorite tees with jeans or dresses with sandals. As an employer, you should hold meetings with third parties the rest of the week.
Holiday parties at Work
Throwing a dinner party for your employees and letting them interact with each other in a relaxed setting does not strike as bad employee benefits, but it is much worse than you can imagine. As an employer, you might be tempted to throw holiday parties to show your employers how much you care. However, they will receive the message as its complete opposite.
Any employee who would want to retain their job would be reluctant to turn down the holiday dinner party invite. But the truth is, no employee would want to spend their holidays with their colleagues. Holidays are a special time that is supposed to be spent with family. People plan to see family in other towns and even states and hope to have a family reunion. By calling them away from their families on a night of celebration, it sends the message that you don’t care about their family life. If you are thinking about doing something good for your employees around the holidays, make a no-contact rule for the holiday week and let them spend their time as they want.
If you want to ensure that the employee benefit you have been considering to offer your employees would be a hit or miss, conduct a poll within the workplace. You might be surprised that most employees only care about basic employee benefits, i.e., health insurance and retirement plans.
