Any credible business must offer benefits to its employees. Top job candidates won’t consider applying to places that don’t have a comprehensive benefits package in place. When putting together the structure of your business, you need to establish what kind of benefits you want to offer to your employees.
But there are a lot of insurance providers out there. How do you decide which is the right one for your small business? First, you need to know the benefit options available to you.
Here are five types of small business benefits.
Table of Contents
Health Benefits
The most common form of benefits offered by employers is health benefits. Health insurance is the number one benefit employees look for in a new job. You can’t expect to have a dedicated team of full-time employees without offering health benefits.
Health benefits include medical, dental, vision care, and others. Not all medical expenses are covered under Canada’s public health plan. With a decent health plan, you and your employees will receive discounted or completely covered medical services.
Alternate options to full health insurance include Health Spending and Wellness Spending Accounts, which give your employees a fixed allowance to pay for certain medical services.
On top of regular medical benefits, you should have some form of life, critical illness, emergency medical, and accidental death insurance. These cover your employees or their beneficiaries in the event of emergencies.
Retirement Benefits
To incentivize employees to remain with your company for the long run, it is a good idea to allow them to work towards retirement. There are a few ways to do this, most commonly with a pension or employee share ownership plan (ESOP). An ESOP company gives its employees an ownership share in the company.
This makes workers want to contribute to the overall success of your business and lets them grow with the company. A T4 puts aside a fixed percentage from each employee’s pay cheque to lower the amount of taxes they owe at year’s end. There are several other retirement benefits you may consider, including annuities, RRSPs, and cash-balance plans.
Creative Benefits
Creative benefits cover a wide variety of benefits that tend to be specific to the type of job an employee has. For example, if your business is in the sales industry, you can offer your sales agents a commission. Or if some of your employees are on the road a lot, you can provide them with a company car and paid lodging.
This is also the benefit type you’d want to get if you plan on offering bonuses to your employees. Gratuities for a restaurant would also fall under this category.
Personal Benefits
Personal benefits allude to any issue that is affecting an employee outside of the workplace. If the issue is related to mental health, you can provide private counseling services for an impacted employee. In other cases, one of your employees may be battling severe personal strife with their family or spouse/partner, in which case a counselor or one of many programs offered by the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) may also come in handy.
Another example of a personal benefit is maternity/paternity leave. Many parents to be worry that becoming pregnant or adopting may adversely affect their standing with their employer. By offering maternity or parental leave, you allow those employees to still collect a paycheck for the full duration of their absence (typically a fixed period of time).
5 Ways to Keep Employees Happy at Work
Happy Employees are the key to cultivating a rich, positive and productive workplace. We love these tips on how to keep employees happy at work.
Flexible Benefits
Flexible benefits allow your employees to select which benefits they’d like to have. There are a ton of choices from which employees can choose. Examples include career planning services, commuting expense relief, flexible scheduling, employee assistance, student loan reimbursement, and many more.
According to Aon’s most recent Rapid Response Survey close to 60% of Canadian employees expect employers to offer flexible benefits packages. This type of benefits package is great for companies that have employees of all ages. People in different age groups are going to value different benefits. Plus, as an employer, you’ll never have to hear from your employees about any benefits that you don’t offer.
Group Benefits with Group Enroll
At Group Enroll, we partner with some of the best group benefits providers in Canada and can set your business up with a comprehensive benefits package.
If you’d like a free group insurance quote, fill out our contact form or give us a call at 1-877-600-5666.
