Is it time to review your company’s benefits package?

Providing the right employee benefits – and ensuring staff can access them in an inclusive, accessible manner, regardless of digital proficiency – is crucial to helping people escape poverty. The right benefits can help increase your people’s spending power, and protect them from financial shocks.

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has found that ‘low earners attach greater value to those benefits that mitigate their highest living costs, such as food and leisure, travel, childcare, housing and utilities’. Here’s how the JRF suggests you can help in these crucial areas:

Housing and utilities: Introduce rental deposit schemes, accommodation and rent subsidies, and technology and telecommunications loans or subsidies.
Childcare: A range of benefits can help to mitigate childcare costs, including flexible working, paid time-off for caring responsibilities, subsidised childcare, or aiding access to the Government’s Tax-Free Childcare scheme.
Travel: If possible, offer transport season ticket loans, travel expenses, company car/van, cycle-to-work/bike loans, and work bus/public transport subsidies.
Food and leisure: Retail and leisure benefits have become more common – these may include free or subsidised meals and drinks, shopping and lifestyle discounts, vouchers, and sporting and recreational facilities.

Many employers now offer employees crisis loans to protect them from unexpected financial shocks, occupational sick pay to enable them to take time off when sick without risking their livelihood, and the option to choose how often they’re paid. (source https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/culture/well-being/employee-financial-well-being/in-work-poverty/provide-financial-wellbeing-support)

Whatever your benefits package looks like, it is important to remind your workforce what’s on offer and how it could help them.