But rest assured, benefits still matter. In fact, they might matter more than ever in such a competitive candidate-led recruitment market.

• “83% of HR leaders believe they’ll need to adapt what they offer employees in order to attract the best talent in a post-pandemic world”.
• “60% of candidates say that benefits and perks are a major factor when considering a job offer”.

In the digital age the power of benefits to draw talent, attract people and retain staff is all-powerful. But knowing how to adapt an existing benefits package, or build a new one from scratch, needs to be strategised. 

Work benefits are intimately tied to your working culture, and the power of the “culture fit” within the recruitment and retention cycle cannot be overstated. 

So whether you’re purchasing an off-the-shelf package of work perks from companies such as PerkBox, Reward Gateway or Fond, or building a more bespoke offering from scratch, your benefits offer has to be context-led, personal, relevant to your audience, sustainable, and deliverable. 

Tech and Benefit Visibility.

It’s worth diving a little deeper into tech, especially considering the importance of curated digital platforms to recruitment and the overall candidate and employee experience (CX/EX).

From discussions with partners, and in our position as a tech company straddling the entire recruitment space, we’ve seen how impactful good – and bad – tech implementations can be. We’ve heard stories of candidates rejecting companies based on poor ATS UX, or simply not having the tools or visibility on company culture and perks to decide on whether or not to join a new employer.

The delivery of workplace benefits and perks – and the communication and visibility of those perks – will go a long way in engaging new talent, and creating game-changing CX.

Hence the emphasis on choosing the right recruitment CRM or ATS – make sure your chosen platform can integrate and customise to meet CX demand and provide the best experience in your field!

Benefits trends.

Your benefits package also has to be trend-led. The current recruitment and talent acquisition landscape is vicious, but only for those who don’t listen to their people – modern recruitment cultures such as a company’s commitment to ESG, sustainability, and diversity are not only considered good business ethics but absolutely essential to talent acquisition and long term recruitment strategy. 

In this regard, benefits need to be tangible – they need to be visible and meaningful, impactful to both employee and community, and sustainable. As mentioned above, they also need to be accessible, and delivered through both innovative tech platforms which are tied into performance management and in-person experiences and rewards. 

So how should employers market their new, future proof work perk packages? 

• Consider industry best practice: do your research and understand how your audience has changed.
• Consider budget: budget consistently.
• Consider incentives and needs: open your arms to the changing demands of candidates. 

Do your research and understand how your audience has changed.

Our view is simple – some perks are desirable no matter the industry, but you still have to know your audience before you build a perk strategy that will turn heads.  

The great resignation, and the lasting effects of millions of people exiting industries, should be your guide when building a sector-specific benefits package. We’re not saying exclusively base benefits around battling pandemic-era problems, but use them as baseline coordinates.

As we mentioned in the introduction, benefits are more than a series of work-related perks, discounts, or lifestyle additions – they represent a holistic, cultural standpoint, like a lighthouse in the career dark. They embody your working culture, what you stand for, and what your employee’s labour means.

So make sure you seek as much feedback on your employees and prospective employees as possible and build a benefits package that gives them what they now want in the post-pandemic era.

Budget consistently.

There are fairly industry-standard budgetary structures you could deploy to build a benefits package, such as Zero-based budgeting (prioritising employee benefits based on employee wants), incremental budgeting (analysing the previous spend and adjusting YoY), and factoring in certain budgeting ethoses such as cost-neutral benefits.

There are also mandatory “benefits” that you are legally entitled to factor into contracts, such as pension contributions and minimum leave/holiday. This in effect creates tiers of benefit spending, and depending on the size of your company and specific employee demands, can have a huge impact on your budgeting. 

Caboodle advises building a benefit structure around the following elements:

• Number of employees (and how this is projected to grow or decrease)
• Projected employee benefits uptake
• Projected changes in retention due to employee benefits
• Any future legislation changes which may affect the cost
• Any bespoke requirements you might have

And around the following types of benefits:

• Health and wellbeing benefits
• Financial wellbeing benefits
• Lifestyle benefits and employee discounts
• Salary sacrifice benefits
• Commuting and travel benefits

Open your arms to the changing demands of candidates. 

Once you’ve made a list of sector-specific perks, fold them into a complete benefits package that includes country-wide benefits demands. 

For example:

• “67% of employees said that paid sick leave matters most to them. Next on the list were flexible working hours at 57%, and pension contribution matching at 46%” – source
• “(A) Perkbox survey also looked at which perks would make employees feel happier in their jobs, with employee discounts again coming out on top (52%)” – source.
• “According to the Harvard Business Review, private health insurance is high on the list. 88% of people surveyed said that this would be a factor when considering a job offer” – source

What are the key takeaways here? Welfare, future-proofing and money management are key drivers of attractive employment opportunities. 

Summary

You will never, ever, lose face if you change benefits packages to meet the needs of your people. 

Creating a benefits package that meets the demands of the modern workforce is a show of commitment to looking after your people, your community and your environment – and there is no greater magnet for talent than that.

A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.

At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post Job Benefits, and the changing nature of the work perk. appeared first on Rectec.

While a 4 day working week is not totally unheralded in the modern working world, this global commitment to understanding how effective a reduced working week could be is finally finding mainstream appeal.

The results could be game changing for how we all navigate our unique disrupted work/life balance, and how we rebuild a workforce fit for the future in the wake of COVID-19.

But don’t we live in enlightened times? Why is the idea of reducing hours better for people? While there are many public health, advisory, guidance, legal and workplace protections and bodies to help curb the excesses or abuses of employers across most of the working world, 4 day week isn’t aiming to change legal strictures or HR policy – it’s aiming to fundementally empower employers to repackage what work means for their people, and rebalance how effective employee’s time is within a modern workplace.

The global trial of a 4 day working week is as a result of modern pressures on modern workforces – the rise of burnout, unbalanced work/life commitments, the fracturing of home life, the necessity of commuter culture, and, as conceptual as it seems, the meaning of work in a rapidly digitising service economy like the UK.

Many of the workers rights we have (such as the 48 hour week, restrictions on shift patterns, the banning of child labour etc), stem from industrial action, decades of toil, the shifting sands of ethics, politics throughout the industrial revolution and over 2 wars, and the birth and death of widespread unionism when the UK was the world’s largest and most wealthy manufacturing nation.

But our labour base has changed, and workforce demands have changed, mostly (with some exceptions) for the good. However, employees in the UK work for more hours on average than EU counterparts, and 1 in 8 people work over the now-mandated 48 hour working week.

It’s worth contextualising just how huge the shift to a national 4 day working week would be in the UK.

It’s similar in scope to the introduction of the 8 hour working day – which was a Victorian fix to a very Victorian problem.

The slogan: “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest” was penned by Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer Robert Owen, in 1817, but it took until the late 19th century/early 20th century for widespread adoption across multiple industries, mostly as a result of strike action and walkouts. It’s worth remembering it took until 1998 for a formal governmental commitment to an 8 hour working day, called the Working Time Directive.

The adoption of an 8 hour working day was as a result of a hundred-year obsession with healthy productivity across our manufacturing base. In 1889 a gentleman called Will Thorne, one of the leading strike organisers for East London’s Beckton Gas Works, and founding member of what would eventually become the GMB union, penned the term “shorten our hours to prolong our lives” – it was a case of life and death, as up until the moment the gas works agreed to the 8 hour day, compulsory shifts were set at 12 hours or 18 hours – ludicrous, lethal and now, thankfully, illegal. From then, we shifted to a 5 day working week (made famous by Henry Ford and his unique production line system of work).

That system hasn’t changed in over 100 years. But work, and the meaning of work, has.

While we live in vastly safer times, and our legal and working welfare systems are some of the best in the world, the question people like Will asked – are we truly working to the best of our availability, is it good for us, and what does our labour mean? – is still relevant.

So what does the 4 day working week look like in practice? What do we already know about the 4 day working week that has led UK employers to adopt the trial?

Iceland

The country of Iceland pivoted to (mostly) a national 4 day work week last year, as a reaction to the pandemic – “Around 85% of workers in Iceland are currently, or on the way to, working four days a week instead of five”.

According to researchers at Autonomy, a U.K.-based think tank, the results were an “overwhelming success…In the Icelandic study, men were more likely to take on domestic tasks, and not to leave them to their partners. It also allows greater forms of collective experience. For instance, spending a lot of time at work can lead people to be isolated from friends and family. In Iceland, people realised how much they valued the extra time they had to pick up their kids from school, to see them in the evening before bed”.

Scotland

ITV reported on a restaurant in Edinburgh who had made the change to a 4 day work week in 2018 as a result of brutal working hours, staff pressures and a sudden realisation of the necessity of staff welfare after recruitment became a struggle due to 70 hour working weeks.

A year after the choice to close on Sundays, and provide a 4 day week for their staff, the restaurant – Aizle – has been a success – “(they have) enjoyed its best financial year, aided by a new seating plan and new kitchen equipment…(and) the improvement in staff morale, which has helped to recruit and retain willing workers… has been the biggest positive”.

Japan

Global electronics behemoth Panasonic recently announced it would offer a 4 day working week to its employees, on the back of a government announcement in June of last year that stipulated companies offer it to staff. Other companies such as Microsoft, Shionogi and Encourage Technologies have done the same over the last few years.

“For the month of August, Microsoft Japan experimented with a new project called Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019, giving its entire 2,300-person workforce five Fridays off in a row without decreasing pay.

The shortened weeks led to more efficient meetings, happier workers and boosted productivity by a staggering 40%, the company concluded at the end of the trial”.

We await the findings of our newest UK trial avidly – if our government and employers are brave and forward thinking, changing to a 4 day working week could revolutionise family life, our high streets and employer outputs. Above all else, it could great a generation of happier people.

A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.

At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complimentary tech marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post The History and Future of the 4 Day Working Week. appeared first on Rectec.