Employee Benefits

mindful meditation HR Insight Wellness Stipends
HR Insight: An Overview of Wellness Stipends 940 788 LaDonna Kearney

HR Insight: An Overview of Wellness Stipends

HR Insight on Wellness Stipends – What You Need to Know.

The importance of health and wellness in the workplace is indisputable. In a 2021 survey, 79% of employees said their employer’s well-being programs helped them become as productive as possible. Additionally, 79% said these programs helped them avoid getting sick. Here is your HR Insight on Wellness Stipends.

Wellness/well-being programs often provide noncash benefits, such as smoking cessation, weight loss, stress management and health screening programs. They can also come in the form of wellness stipends.

A wellness stipend is an allowance given to employees to help pay for eligible physical and mental wellness expenses.

It should not be confused with a health stipend, which covers medical expenses like health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs.

Wellness stipends are limited to expenses for items that promote general wellness and well-being.

For example, wellness stipends may be used for:

  • Counseling to help employees cope with stress.
  • Weight loss program membership.
  • Ergonomic furniture to support a comfortable office work environment.
  • Gym membership or equipment.
  • Exercise/fitness classes.
  • Yoga classes.
  • Mobile apps for mindfulness/meditation.
  • Nutrition classes.
  • Diabetes education.
  • Chiropractic care.

A real-world example

According to a 2022 HR Dive article, Ernst & Young offers a comprehensive wellness stipend program. Employees can use their stipend to pay for:

  • Home office equipment
  • Fitness classes.
  • Workout equipment.
  • Meal delivery services.
  • Electric bikes and converter kits.
  • Blenders.
  • Juicers.
  • Air fryers.
  • Massages.
  • Tents and camping equipment.
  • Mattresses.
  • Airfare.
  • Hotels and other lodging.
  • Rental cars.

Per HR Dive, “EY has also expanded the fund to include a form of self-care that its chief well-being officer acknowledges as ‘controversial.’ Gaming consoles and chairs, headsets and ear buds, controllers, monitors, and webcams are all eligible for reimbursement by EY.” The same goes for the actual video games.

Of course, not every employer can afford to offer such an extensive list of items. Also, some employers might not see certain items as necessary and will prefer to stick to the essentials.

In the end, the stipend amount depends on what the employer can afford or wants to pay.

According to HR Dive, as of 2022, EY pays a generous 75% of the cost of eligible wellness expenses, up to a maximum stipend amount of $1,000 per year per employee. Other employers can choose to offer a different or smaller amount (e.g., $500 per year per employee) based on their own budgetary constraints.

Wellness stipends are distributed on a monthly, quarterly, semiannual or annual basis. For example, you can choose to offer your employees a $50-per-month wellness stipend.

A wellness stipend program can increase the quality and retention rates of employee talent.

But before offering such a program, try to make sure your employees will actually use the stipends. Keep in mind that wellness stipends are taxable to employees, and this may affect the program’s participation rates.

©2023

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Time Off To Volunteer as an Employee Benefit 1024 577 LaDonna Kearney

Time Off To Volunteer as an Employee Benefit

“To prosper over time,” Laurence Fink, CEO of BlackRock, once wrote in a public letter, “every company must not only deliver financial performance but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” Employee volunteer programs help you align with your corporate vision by offering such opportunities to your employees and nonprofit partners. Thoughtful planning and execution are essential to having an impact on company culture and making a difference for your team and in your community.

Paid time off for volunteering is one of the few employee benefits that’s increased significantly over the past five years. Among the benefits of well-designed company volunteer programs are boosting productivity and increasing employee engagement.

Working together to tackle community issues in different settings tests employees’ adaptability and problem-solving abilities. More than 80% of professionals surveyed pointed to volunteer programs as helping them develop leadership skills. Volunteering promotes trust and camaraderie by building a sense of community among employees as they work toward common goals. Service to the community builds teamwork internally — 79% said that volunteer service improved their communication skills.

Programs that prioritize meaning and give employees a belief that their efforts contribute in important ways are successful. You can create an initiative and give employees active roles in shaping their focus and features or provide the basic scaffolding for volunteering and allow workers to create and build specific opportunities that fit the company’s vision and appeal to their personal passions.

Employees are motivated to volunteer by intrinsic factors: self-esteem and recognition. Younger talent consider volunteer programs a significant priority when evaluating potential jobs. Nearly two-thirds of young professionals say they’d prefer to work for a firm that provides opportunities to serve the community with their skills.

Benefits to the bottom line

Corporate service can build brand awareness, affinity, trust and loyalty among customers. A good reputation is increasingly linked to bottom-line benefits such as improved sales and employee productivity. Stronger communities result in more robust markets and a deeper pool of workforce talent.

The types of opportunities and incentives you offer your workers — along with the technology and communications you employ to facilitate, track and promote these opportunities — contribute to your program’s success and impact.

You’re empowering employees to be change agents in the community. Encourage employee ownership, and enlist the right partners. Your program will help you and your workers create meaningful impact. What kind of impact is your volunteer program having? Your firm should prioritize meaning, balance top-down structure with bottom-up passion and seek to involve a variety of stakeholders. Even in trying times, there are good reasons to preserve well-run programs.

Volunteers tend to be better citizens at work, helping others and voicing ideas. Among the established benefits of volunteering are a sense of well-being and purpose and better physical and mental health. Your program should be tailored to your firm size as well as customer and investor expectations.

But watch out for these pitfalls:

  • Imitating other companies’ programs.
  • Prioritizing your own pet project.
  • Lacking flexibility in allowing employees to suggest volunteering opportunities.
  • Making volunteering mandatory, diminishing intrinsic motivation and satisfaction. You don’t want employees who participate just to make a good impression on co-workers and supervisors.

Successful volunteer programs serve to recruit top talent, increase team member satisfaction and retention, focus on employee wellness, and develop skills. Is your volunteer program aligning with your employees’ skills and your own company values?

Volunteerism can play an important role in engaging employees, serving stakeholders, meeting social impact goals and ensuring your company’s sustainability, while also having a positive impact on your community. A study discovered that employee loyalty increased not only among those who volunteered but also among those who didn’t, prompting comments like “It’s great that my company offers volunteer programs” and “I’m happy that volunteering is available at my company.”

©2023

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What to know about flexible work arrangements 1024 577 LaDonna Kearney

What to know about flexible work arrangements

Will we need more or less office space as companies ask people to come back to the office this year? Will employers negotiate smaller, cheaper digs after having made their peace with employees working from home more often, or will square footage be necessary to give workers safe distancing space? Will we say goodbye to open floor plans and hello to enclosed offices and even — gasp! — cubicles?

Ultimately, we may have to think of remote work as much-desired employee benefit.

What happened to our productivity? Were we able to get a lot of work done? If we didn’t accomplish as much as we thought we would, was that more a product of the strangeness of having the whole family at home at once? Of having to homeschool? Of having more Zoom meetings that just took you away from work? Will productivity measures confirm employers’ worst fears about working at home or demonstrate that productivity is possible both at home and in the office? The proof will be in the work that was accomplished.

Unconventional thinking posits that flexibility increases employee job satisfaction, leading to higher productivity. It also helps with hiring: The candidate pool widens when you can look for talent beyond your physical location.

Offering flexibility means accommodating changing lifestyles, health issues and family changes. In recent years, many employers learned to live with flexible work arrangements that they’d been denying parents for years. If they keep offering those options, perhaps all parents will be able to spend more time with their children without sacrificing their careers.

Even the practice of fostering safe distances among workers by being flexible about hours and staggering shifts may have broader implications. Not everyone can work from 9 to 5; maybe allowing workers to choose hours will mean less crowding on roads, in public transit and on streets as well.

It’s clear that employers have seen that working at home is possible, and that realization may very well translate to expanded flexible work arrangements. Remote work arrangements already had been growing, with the number of remote workers increasing by 159% between 2005 and 2017, according to the U.S. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Encouraging work-life balance and increasing employee loyalty and engagement are other advantages of flexible work arrangements. Many employees value having a choice in when, where and how they work — especially if it means spending less time in traffic.

Economists predict that our forced confinement during the peak pandemic months will lead to flexible work arrangements that will result in:

  • Lower overhead.
  • Lower office costs.
  • Finding and keeping talent without worrying about access to public or private transport or accessibility issues.

Flexible arrangements, we’ve found out during quarantine, include noise from children in the background and require talents beyond our job descriptions, such as live video, blogging and social media.

Openness to working with diverse teams in flexible ways, offering a range of talents and solutions, will strengthen business capabilities into the future. No longer will work-life flexibility come without training or guidance on how to manage it well. Employers have tried it themselves; they know it needs more support to work.

©2023

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