Social benefits for companies and, therefore, social benefits for employees, are a set of measures that companies use to reward their employees’ work and that do not directly consist of a monetary benefit. As such, they are an instrument that can be very valuable in improving certain aspects of employees’ lives, with the expectation that this will result in their performance and productivity, as well as in attracting, developing, and retaining talent.
Essential social benefits for companies: mental health
Currently, social discourse in general and that of employees, in particular, could be characterized, among other things, by placing the importance of taking care of mental health at the center of demands and as social benefits for companies. A constant allusion is made to the psychological well-being of employees, especially to talk about its gradual deterioration, the psychosocial risk factors that threaten it, and the lack of real opportunities that large sectors of the population have to access professional mental health care.
Like so many other phenomena, this discourse stems from causes that are more or less distant in time.
1. Immediate triggers
To begin with, it is the result of short-term triggers, for example, news related to mental health problems -especially of public figures- that achieve enormous notoriety through the media and social media.
2. Close history
Secondly, more distant precedents, such as the almost two years that we have been living with the pandemic and its consequences.
3. Remote precedents
Of course, the more remote precedents must also be mentioned. Here we would place the long development of a system of work that is voracious, competitive, and more focused on results than on processes (therefore, more oriented to ends than to means). A system in which social benefits for companies are not very effective in achieving a real advantage in terms of their well-being at work.
In short, we come from a time when the psychological health of employees has been a secondary, even tertiary, issue, unlike the official discourse with which many companies now associate themselves.
|What are employee social benefits?||Social benefits are the goods or services received by the employees of a company, in addition to their salary, for their work. They are designed to improve the employee’s quality of life.|
|Employee benefits||– It is a service or product that improves your well-being and is often essential. |
– Taxed to Social Security
| – Social benefits favor talent retention|
– They are a tool that improves employee satisfaction.
– They can also improve the organizational environment and motivation.
Most popular benefits
|– Emotional well-being|
– Medical Insurance
Employee benefits: the relationship
When designing a social benefits strategy that is appropriate to a company’s current circumstances, it is important to consider what employees are looking for in a company. It is not just a matter of wishes, such as those satisfied through an act of “generosity”. Rather, it is about having a balanced relationship.
The fact that the ideas of commitment, loyalty, fidelity, ownership, identification, and belonging are so often alluded to in the context of the workplace only reinforces another idea that brings them all together: what happens between the company and its employees is a relationship.
Whether the employees are aware of it or not, this link between them and the company they work for is not limited to the so-called “employment relationship” in its most technical sense, which is formalized in the contract signed by both parties. Instead, it is a relationship that goes beyond the strictly contractual and also involves psychosocial aspects of enormous importance for the well-being of the employee and the company’s bottom line.
Social benefits for companies: employee expectation
Social benefits should be clearly aligned with the aspirations, expectations, and needs of employees. When these are met, they have a positive impact on company productivity.
Generally, what employees value most has to do with salary but also with the way the company regards them professionally, the interest of the projects they work on, and the quality of relationships with colleagues and managers and the working environment.
They also tend to highlight as something very positive the fact that the company is flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the employees and that it is not always the employees who have to adapt in a unidirectional way to the needs of the company. Moreover, it is often very important -especially when it comes to working on interesting or meaningful projects- that corporate values are consistent with the employee’s personal values.
Post-pandemic employee benefits
All of the above would apply to the period immediately prior to the pandemic. It still applies now, of course, but a new nuance should be added: employees value highly the fact that the company is concerned about their well-being through concrete measures relating to mental health protection. These measures should be included in your employee benefits program or in some kind of incentive program aimed at improving motivation, so important in any context but especially in those that make it difficult to fully experience the corporate culture, such as working from home. Of course, these types of measures help to improve the work engagement of current employees and enhance the inbound recruiting strategy.
HR departments have realized this and are committed to investing in the emotional health of employees as a means of boosting the motivation and commitment of the most important resource they have (people) but only some companies are able to take proper care of it.
This is where the help that ifeel can provide to organizations in their objective of generating social benefit programs for companies that are really effective and make expressions such as “emotional salary” have real meaning for their recipients and prioritize prevention with an efficient criterion.
Emotional well-being for companies
At ifeel, we understand that it is not possible to take care of the company without taking care of the psychological well-being of its employees. To do so, we have an emotional well-being program for companies, designed by our team of occupational well-being psychologists with one main objective: to help companies place employee health at the center of their strategy to build their mission statement.
Thanks to this partnership, the people in charge of HR departments can receive personalized, data-driven advice on how to make good decisions in a company to get the most out of the teams they are in charge of and take better care of the psychological well-being of the people in them.
Moreover, this program offers employees a holistic mental health care service structured at different levels according to their needs. This service includes, if required, online psychological therapy with a psychologist specialized in cases like theirs. Try our program today so you can see how it could help you.
We hope you have found this post about social benefits for companies useful. If you want more information about our emotional well-being program for companies, simply request it and we will contact your team as soon as possible. You may also be interested in this post about mental health at work.