Lifestyle benefits are supposed to be just that for your employees: benefits. However, unless your employees are interested in, and see the value in, the perks that you offer them, they won’t truly benefit anyone.
Read below to understand what you can do to offer benefits that genuinely improve your employee’s quality of life and how the ability to customize those lifestyle benefits can ultimately increase enrollment in those benefits programs.
What are lifestyle benefits?
Simply put, lifestyle benefits are perks of the job that improve your employees’ quality of life in one way or another. These benefits can include (but are not limited to) products and services, discount programs, or other amenities.
Some examples of these would be a company that gives complimentary products to their employees, on-site hair cutting services, discounted gym memberships, or access to a company gym.
Lifestyle benefits are also known as voluntary benefits
While lifestyle benefits intend to improve the quality of your employees’ lives, they are not required to utilize any or all the perks that you offer them. Along the same lines, as an employer, these are not benefits that you are required to offer.
For these reasons, they are also known as voluntary benefits. Being voluntary, a genuine problem that HR departments can face is offering benefits programs that their employees will voluntarily sign up for.
Employees will sign up for lifestyle benefits that they are genuinely interested in
This might sound obvious but understanding what your employees really want and need from your benefits program is vital to convincing them to sign up for these programs.
Generally speaking, many businesses are choosing to focus on benefits and perks that can improve their employees’ physical and mental health, and offering those types of programs is becoming very typical. Following these and other trends of lifestyle benefits set by other companies in your industry is a good yardstick by which to compare your own programs.
To better meet the unique needs of your own company’s workforce, conducting surveys and having benefits-related conversations with your employees can be good ways to uncover what they are looking for in your benefits programs.
On a deeper level, understanding the types of lives that your employees hope to build for themselves through their career and what they find important in the greater scheme of life can reframe the idea of a voluntary work benefit. With a bit of creative thinking, you can use this understanding to offer perks that will genuinely and significantly improve your employees’ lives.
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Offering benefits that employees want is only half of the equation
No matter how brilliant, valuable, and appealing the benefits are that you include in your packages, not everyone will feel the same way about all of them. Although your employees will probably share some values and mindsets (they do all work for the same company, after all), each employee is an individual with unique tastes, wants, and needs.
This is why one of the ways that a fantastic benefits package can fall flat is by offering it as an all-or-nothing deal.
One plan does not fit all
People do not like to be wasteful, particularly when it comes to money. So, when given an all-or-nothing choice to pay for a bulk benefits package, they will often choose nothing. Even if there are some benefits included that they would like to have, they can easily be outweighed when combined with several “perks” that they know they will never use.
This feeling of “wasting” money on unutilized benefits is hard for many employees to shake.
The option to customize lifestyle benefits packages is key to enrollment
To meet the unique needs of your employees, it is crucial that they can choose to opt-in for the lifestyle benefits that they want and opt-out of those voluntary benefits they are not interested in, have no need for, or do not place a high enough value on.
When your employees are given the option to opt into the exact perks they want and pass on those they don’t, nothing stops them from signing up for your voluntary benefits programs.
How do you assemble these customizable lifestyle benefits packages?
On the other side of things, giving your employees the power to pick and choose their benefits means that you need to offer benefits plans with the option for those kinds of customizations.
Historically, creating those kinds of personalized benefits plans was just not an option. Creating far more work for HR than would be reasonable for the tradeoff of high enrollment in a benefits program that was painstakingly assembled bit by bit. It is no wonder that “one size fits all” benefits packages had been the norm since the beginning of a corporate business.
Luckily, as the modern workplace has evolved with technology, it can easily offer custom lifestyle benefits to your valued employees.
How can Breakroom Benefits help you to offer these custom lifestyle benefits?
Breakroom Benefits acts as a bridge between your company and the benefits you want to offer. Your employees will want to enroll and enjoy a wide array of perks, voluntary, and lifestyle benefits.
Breakroom Benefits provides curated lifestyle options for your employees to choose from. With an ever-growing network of benefits and programs, we make it easy for your employees to find perks that will genuinely benefit their lives and for them to enroll in those programs with a cutting-edge app with a user-friendly interface.
Being a part of Breakroom Benefits means that even small or medium companies can have access to perks and programs that require a large group size to qualify for. Giving you the option to offer these perks to all of your employees without worrying about a minimum number of participants to guarantee your group rates.
