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When attracting and retaining top talent at your company, it’s crucial to offer employees lucrative benefits. If you don’t, you’ll lose expert professionals to companies that do offer benefits and perks.
But when it comes to providing remote employees with benefits, choosing the right contractual extras can be a bit challenging; employment details vary drastically for those who work from home.
So instead of risking the loss to your business, consider offering your remote employees these appealing benefits.
Global Health Insurance
You won’t be able to offer regular health insurance when managing employees that are located around the globe. Fortunately, you can invest in global health insurance for groups. This kind of insurance policy will ensure your remote employees can receive quality healthcare regardless of where in the world they are located.
Office Equipment Allowance
Your remote employees will need tech devices at home to work remotely. Instead of expecting your team to afford the costs of laptops, internet access, and device maintenance or replacement, offer a device allowance for each remote employee.
By providing remote workers with office equipment, you won’t need to worry about potential absenteeism due to a lack of equipment.
Performance Bonuses
It’s a bit more challenging to keep remote employees motivated and productive simply because there is no effective form of supervising professionals that work from home. However, you can offer performance appraisal bonuses or incentives for productivity.
Create a reward system that keeps employees striving towards a weekly or monthly productivity goal.
Online Training
Professionals are noticeably more loyal to companies that encourage career growth. So, if you aren’t providing online training for remote employees, you might lose your best professionals to your competitors.
Online training courses are more affordable than traditional education programs. As a result, you’ll be able to stretch the training budget even more by encouraging in-house employees to opt for online training as well.
Vacation Pay
Unless you are taking on freelance professionals remotely, you should provide all remote employees with vacation pay. Moreover, be sure to provide employees with sufficient vacation time to encourage work-life balance.
Due to the new increase in remote employees, some employers have cut back on paid time off as they feel employees are more rested at home. However, this mistake is fueling burnout among professionals. As a result, it’s crucial to offer remote workers enough paid time off.
Paid time off should include vacation leave, family emergency leave, sick leave, and other essential leave types.
Childcare Allowance
Parents that work from home might have the benefit of having their kids around during work hours. However, this can ultimately become a distraction that negatively impacts employee productivity.
Instead of expecting parents that work at your company to afford childcare costs as additional expenses, consider this a cost of employment that the company should cover. You’ll notice an increase in productivity in employees that are parents.
Team Building And Social Gatherings
One of the challenges that remote employees face is isolation; there’s no motivation from colleagues at the next desk, and this can lead to depression in some.
Instead of overlooking this challenge, include wellness programs and virtual team-building activities, and plan routine social gatherings for employees with the help of virtual platforms. Offering remote employees these benefits is a great way to unify the team and prevent isolation from impacting employee productivity.
Branded Employee Items
Providing in-house employees with branded merchandise such as water bottles, writing tools, notebooks, USBs, and even apparel is a great way to boost employee loyalty. And there’s no reason you can’t apply this tactic to remote employees.
Celebrate Special Occasions
If you want to ensure remote employees don’t feel overlooked on occasions such as birthdays, retirement, promotions, and others, you should make a point of acknowledging these special events for each employee.
When it comes to birthdays, consider meal vouchers or gift cards. Otherwise, you can also consider virtual greeting cards or a small monetary bonus.
Burnout Leave
These days, more and more professionals are becoming aware of the severe impacts of investing too much into work. Instead of hoping employees don’t experience burnout, it’s wise to consider offering burnout leave for remote employees that need a bit more time off.
This kind of paid time off might not be a standard offering as of yet, which is why providing employees with burnout leave is an effective way to boost employee loyalty and attract new talent to the company. With this, if offering paid time off for burnout is too much of a cost to the company, consider offering unpaid time off that allows employees to decide how much time they can afford to take off.
As remote work grows in popularity among professionals, it’s becoming more and more important to offer remote employees benefits that make working from home a wise career move.
