How can you overcome the hurdle of employee benefits?

How can you overcome the hurdle of employee benefits?

Being in HR can mean struggling to find the time and resources to keep up with the ever-changing legislative changes while trying to perform your daily tasks. This can be made worse when trying to find the right benefits that will get employees excited and motivated. As HR has progressively taken on a plethora of different roles, employee compensation and benefits have begun to be included in the roles of the typical HR personnel. This can be a relatively difficult task to fulfil without the right training and advice. In this article, there are some common problems listed and suggestions for resolving them.

1. Staying relevant in a constantly changing market

Changes in legislation have resulted in an added burden in job scope and responsibilities for HR workers. Many HR workers now need to carry out their daily responsibilities while learning new roles and skills. This can include staying up to date on the collection and management of employee data for submission to the IRS. With the ever-changing and increasing number of rules and regulations to abide by, especially with regards to healthcare in the challenging times of COVID, HR individuals now take on increasing burdens to help their companies stay out of trouble with the law and avoiding fines and penalties.

A way that you can ensure your company is abreast with the various policies and information being disseminated is to stay ready and informed. Staying up to date can be a daunting task to leave to an untrained individual. It may be more expedient to leave the task of keeping abreast to someone who is tasked specifically with remaining up to date with the latest policies. It may also be more beneficial for your company to break up the task of staying abreast with new manpower and hiring policies with various other departments. Many SMEs have also chosen to outsource this duty to other companies to ensure the job is done properly, allowing them to focus on running their business.

2. Balancing added responsibilities with daily tasks

In many SMEs, HR tasks are given to the administrative assistant, secretary or even managed by upper management. These additional tasks can stretch them too thin due to the need for them to keep up with the changing policies and laws that come into place, while being laden with the company’s administrative work. Placing the complex intricacies of the labour law compliance, employee relations, budgetary processes and compliance with the evolving healthcare legislation on top of the typical HR roles that they fulfil can prove to be too demanding, leading to oversight in the company, which can come back to haunt the firm.

Similar to the first point, one way to ensure all your HR tasks are handled properly is to ensure that they are handled by people with specialized skills and training in HR policies. This can ensure your company employees are freed up to concentrate on their tasks while ensuring that your HR policies are handled with the utmost accuracy and care.

3. Providing benefits that employees are excited about

Many companies offer different benefits packages that appeal to a wide range of employees. However, many employees are unaware of the full scope of the benefits available to them. One way of engaging employees and ensuring they are motivated to work at their highest capacity is to ensure that they are fully aware of the benefits available to them. If the company offers various packages, it may be better to brief employees on the various benefit packages available to them and recommend the one most suitable for them. It may even be worth considering providing one to one advice for employees who are unsure of the benefits available to them. This can help attract and retain talent in your company.

It is also important to appeal to a wide range of demographics through your benefits. The younger generation has vastly different preferences for benefits. As finances become less of a motivating factor for the younger generation to work, it is important to provide them with benefits like a flexible work schedule or even individual-specific benefits. It is also important to retain the original benefits given to more senior workers, while providing them a chance to change their benefits. This will ensure the more financially motivated older generation of workers will still remain satisfied with their benefits.

4. Making unbiased decisions

It is natural for humans to be biased for people and things that they are more familiar with. However, it is important to take a step back and survey the situation holistically, identifying bias and making decisions that are free from those biases. There has been increasing focus on bringing in diverse talents from all groups in society, and indeed this is a good movement. It helps bring various perspectives into the company, appealing to a wider audience and bringing in a greater amount of business for you.

To ensure good business practices, it is important to adopt strict procedures that ensure incoming and existing talent is treated and evaluated equally. It may be important to deem a unit or person to deal specifically with workplace equality and diversity.

Many of these tasks and responsibilities are important and should not be left in the hands of an untrained personnel, due to the gravitas and complexity of the issues. However, many of these issues can be tasked to an external taskforce, which will help ensure that these tasks are handled with care and high-quality results are produced. Prime HR offers HR consultation services, which can help you to take the burden of these issues off of your shoulders.