First published on Tuesday, May 4, 2021
Last updated on Thursday, January 30, 2025
Offering employees benefits can have a significant impact on your business.
Staff benefits can enhance employee wellbeing, attract new talent, and define your company culture.
If you don't offer benefits, your employees are more likely to feel unmotivated and unhappy at work, which could cause them to seek a new job.
But what are employee benefits, and how do you decide on the best staff benefits package for your business?
Let's dive in...
What are employee benefits?
Employee benefits are a type of compensation offered to employees on top of their typical salary. They can be financial or non-financial.
Canadian employers are legally required to offer employees their minimum contributions to these mandatory staff benefits:
Canada Pension Plan (CPP) or Quebec Pension Plan (QPP)
Employment Insurance (EI)
Provincial Workers' Compensation
While these mandatory staff benefits provide a safety net for your staff, it's common to offer other employee benefits that go above and beyond.
Why you should offer employee benefits
Employee benefits are more than just add-ons to an employee's salary. The right set of benefits can have a significant impact on both your business and your staff. There are many reasons to do so:
Improve employee wellbeing
As working lives can often seep into personal lives, it's important to prioritize your employees’ wellbeing. By offering mental health support, you can help to improve the mental health and wellbeing of your staff.
When you prioritize health and wellbeing you can maximize team potential, enhance morale, increase efficiency, and minimize absenteeism.
For example, providing a benefit like an employee assistance program can help them achieve a healthy work life balance.
Increase productivity and employee engagement
If you want your employees to perform their best, it's important to make them feel appreciated.
Providing benefits that excite and engage them can increase their enthusiasm for their work and inspire them to go above and beyond in their job performance.
For example, offering an employee recognition platform allows you to use praise to engage and motivate your staff.
Increase employee retention
It's expensive to hire new staff. Research shows that the average cost of replacing an employee is more than $30,000 annually.
By offering benefits that improve staff happiness, you can improve employee retention and reduce the chances of your workers looking for a new job.
For example, by offering an employee benefit like e-learning for career development, your staff know that you care about their future. When you invest in your people, they're more likely to invest in you.
Attract new talent
As well as keeping your existing employees, company benefits can be a huge bonus to potential new hires. When looking for a new job many people will consider what benefits a company offers.
If your benefits reflect your company's values, show a commitment to treating your staff fairly and are not the same benefits as everyone else, you can expect that more skilled employees will want to work for you.
Define company culture
Company culture refers to the values of your organization. You should state these values explicitly in your employee handbook; however, a well-defined benefits package will help to reinforce them.
The benefits you decide to offer employees can help to create a positive work environment. For example, offering free food gives staff an opportunity to sit and eat together.
Alternatively, offering flexible working or creating a remote work policy allows workers to find the schedule that works best for their lives.
Save money
Implementing working benefits can sound expensive—all these add-ons, on top of paying salaries.
However, you can actually save money.
Especially if you invest in the right people management software that offers staff benefits built in.
And with the right benefits package, you won't need to compete with higher salaries being offered by your competitors.
Examples of employee benefits
Employee benefits come in all shapes and sizes. There are endless Canadian employee benefits options but some of the most popular employee benefits are:
Lifestyle benefits
With the growing need for achieving work-life balance, many employers are opting for benefits that can improve their employees' lives outside of work.
It's important to consider offering benefits like childcare costs, parental leave, professional development opportunities, generous holiday entitlement or remote flexible working arrangements.
By enhancing the lives of your staff, you in turn enhance their loyalty to you.
Health benefits
Ensuring the health and well-being of your staff is essential for maintaining high morale and productivity.
Consider providing additional sick pay, wellness programs, specialist healthcare services, access to an on-site gym or a discounted gym membership to help your staff stay in tip-top shape.
Financial benefit
Providing extra financial assistance to your staff is a highly desirable benefit for many employees and can assist many employers in attracting new staff.
But there is more to it than offering pay increases and bonuses.
Some alternative financial employee benefits include workplace pension plans, performance-based bonuses, investment opportunities, student loan repayment assistance, relocation expenses, and travel allowances.
Insurance benefits
Protecting your staff and business is essential, and having the right insurance policies in place is one of the best ways to do so.
Employee insurance benefits allow you to provide staff members with financial support for any unforeseen circumstances that wouldn't allow them to work, such as serious illness.
These policies can include private medical insurance, life insurance, group income protection insurance, and group critical illness cover, depending on your requirements.
By being proactive and taking steps to safeguard your business, you can minimize risk and ensure the safety of your livelihood.
How to choose the best employee benefits plan?
Now that you have knowledge of the various benefits that you can provide, it's time to determine the perks you want to offer to your team.
It's important to note that different people will have differing views on which benefits are most suitable for them, and you will need to evaluate which options work best for your business.
A good way to do this is to decide on what will make your existing employees feel valued and create a strong offering that benefits all involved.
You could begin by identifying which benefits your employees will gain the most from. For instance, if you believe that providing a better work life balance would be advantageous to your team, consider implementing such a perk.
Alternatively, you could create a staff engagement survey to find out exactly what employee benefits they would like to see before deciding.
Get help with employee benefits today with BrightHR
There's a lot to consider when putting together your benefit provision package and the costs of having separate employee benefits can quickly add up.
But with employee benefits built into our award-winning software, we have made it easy and cost-effective to implement employee benefits while transforming your people management.
With BrightHR's HR software you can:
Implement an employee discount scheme
Our exclusive online marketplace, Bright Exchange allows you to give your employees access to thousands of discounts and unmissable offers without any extra costs.
Plus, you can advertise your business on the platform as many times as you want for free.
Engage and motivate your staff with PRAISE
Empower and incentivize your team with our employee recognition platform.
We've made it easy to boost productivity and morale with our praise system that encourages teamwork and allows you to instantly spot and celebrate top performers.
Empower your staff with professional development
Support employee development with e-learning to easily develop and upskill your staff, without the hefty training costs.
And give your staff access to interactive learning with course completion certificates and a Learning Management System that helps you track staff progress.
A well-defined benefits package will keep your staff happy and motivated. But if you get it wrong, you can end up spending money on rewards that go unused.
So, what are you waiting for? Discover how BrightHR can save you money with the right rewards and transform your people management today, by booking your free demo.
