Welcome to the world of remote working, the world has changed a lot in the past 2 years and one of the biggest trends is that after getting a taste for remote work during the pandemic, employees don’t want to go back to the office.
While remote working used to be considered a special perk for only the best and most responsible employees, it’s now a must have if you want your business to be competitive when recruiting talent.
But on the backside of this all those office perks you’ve used to help recruitment efforts like free coffee, pizza parties, office foosball tables and casual Fridays are now rendered moot by the work from home revolution.
Not only is offering remote work essential for employers now, but it also means you need to reconsider what staff perks you offer, if all your perks are office-centric you’ll struggle to attract and keep workers who prefer to work from home.
So all of this leads us to the big question: What staff perks should you offer to remote employees?
- Utilities Subsidy
When your employees work from home rather than the office, as a business owner you save money as overhead costs like Wi-Fi and electricity are put onto your employees rather than you. And of course your employees will end up having higher utility bills as a result of this.
To counter-act this shift, employers have started offering subsidies on increased electric bills and high speed WiFi to employees to help cover the extra costs they incur, obviously it’s too much for employees to expect you cover their bills, but offering a small subsidy to remote workers will make your business more attractive to top talent.
- Office Set Up Subsidy
When employees start to work from home, they need to set themselves up a good home office, if your employees moved from office work to working from home, they have a lot of things they need to buy for their home office like a proper desk, desk chairs and window blinds for their home office.
If they were an office worker, you as the business owner would usually be footing the bill for desks and chairs, so a great perk is to offer remote employees a small subsidy to help cover the cost of setting up a home office, this perk will be great at luring talent away from office bound companies and will make your business much more attractive to those who want to work remotely.
- Home Office Care Packages
When your employees are working remotely, it can be harder to form an emotional connection to your business, in an office a business owner can have regular face time with employees and form an emotional connection with them, when they’re working at home that’s harder to do.
So, to keep you in your employees mind, a regular Office Care Package can be an excellent perk that keeps your remote staff happy and engaged. You don’t need to be excessive with your care package, just mailing out some small hampers with coffee, biscuits and sweets once a month is more than enough to whip up some more loyalty among your remote teams.
- Team Building Events
The best way to foster chemistry between your employees is to get them to have facetime with each other, which is easy enough in an office as watercooler chats, lunch time hangouts and after work beers usually happen naturally in an office, but when your team are working remotely, those small bonding moments don’t happen.
To remedy this, team building events are necessary to keep your employees all on the same side. You can have these events in-person or over video chats, but having regular events where your employees can see each other and talk is important for creating a good company culture, to make the most of this, off-site events like go-karting, team meals and BBQs are good ways to bring your team together in a neutral environment.