Employee benefits can play a vital role in keeping employees motivated and increasing their job satisfaction. However, employers can often find that employees don’t utilize the employee benefits.
Employees not utilizing their benefits can only bring you disadvantages to the employers. Firstly, unused employee benefits cannot contribute to employees’ motivation. Secondly, they waste your efforts, money, and resources.
Therefore, as an employer, it can greatly benefit you to encourage your employees to fully utilize their benefits. The following tips might help you accomplish the task:
Communicate the Employee Benefits
Often, employee benefits are not utilized due to employees’ lack of knowledge about them. However, this issue can be easily resolved by communicating the benefits regularly to the employees. Employers can communicate the benefits through visual messages on emails and texts directly to employees’ phone numbers so they cannot miss it.
Highlight Different Benefits at Different Times
Employers can encourage the utilization of employee benefits by promoting different employee benefits at different times of the year. For example, the employee benefit of a gym membership can be promoted before, during, and after the holiday season. If the gym has a swimming pool, the summer months can also be perfect for encouraging employees to go swimming to beat the heat.
Similarly, employers can also remind employers to get flu shots before the flu season arrives, encouraging them to utilize the employee benefit of medical coverage.
Make it Easy to Utilize the Benefits
At times, employee benefits can be difficult to navigate. HR personnel may require employees to complete paperwork to utilize the benefits each time, or the terms of utilizing employee benefits may be too complicated.
A complicated procedure to utilize benefits can be worse than providing no benefits. Employees might see complicated procedures to qualify for or utilize employee benefits as an unwillingness of the employer to provide the benefits. This can sow mistrust and can result in demotivated employees.
Employers can avoid this tricky situation by utilizing the benefits easy for employees. Making it possible to utilize the benefits through the employee cards can be the easiest way to ensure maximum employees take advantage of the employee benefits.
Diversify the Benefits
Different employees have different needs. Hence, diverse employee benefits will find more usage.
Allow some level of customization and personalization for the benefits to each employee can utilize it as best as they need. Instead of providing various employee benefits, essential employee benefits with customization possibility can find more usage from your employees.
Take Feedback from Employees
One of the best ways to encourage employees to utilize employee benefits is to ask what keeps them from utilizing them and resolving their issues. Employee feedback can help employers design and offer better employee benefits, improving employee morale and job satisfaction even more.
Finally, monitoring the use of employee benefits can also help employers understand their lack of use and come up with solutions for it.
