How to Select the Right Employment Benefits for Your Writers
Taking care of your employees is one of the most important things to do for a company. If you don’t, you will see low productivity, motivation, and efficiency in your employees. That is why you should always work to keep your employees happy and satisfied. Offering the right employment benefits is a great way of doing so.
Employment benefits used to be an addition to the salary but nowadays, people tend to overlook salaries and focus on employment benefits.
This shift towards a more experiential payout rather than a financial one has paved way for new and unique employment benefits. However, most companies struggle with this because every company has limited resources. In addition, deciding which employment benefits to offer, can be difficult.
Here’s how you can make the process easier.
Know Your Company
The first thing to do is to understand where you stand as a company. This means you need to analyze your product and/or service offerings. You need to analyze your company culture, your goals, objectives, mission, and vision. After that, you need to check your resources, financial standing, as well as your work environment.
Even if you’re trying to figure out the right employment benefits for your writers, you need to get into the specifics. Whether you have writers in a marketing firm, in a content agency, in a multinational, or in a magazine company, etc.
Once you have an idea about your company, you will know which employment benefits you are able to offer and in what capacity.
Analyze Your Employees
You probably have a diverse set of employees in your company. Especially when it comes to writers, as they tend to be very diverse. This means that they will have different priorities, likes, dislikes, wants and needs.
You still have to offer all the employees the basic benefits such as medical insurance, dental insurance, car insurance, sick days, vacation days, 401k, retirement plans, and pension plans among other things. However, these benefits are what you offer to everyone and they’re offered by every company on different levels.
What makes you different is the additional employment benefits you offer to your employees. These can be things like gym memberships, free food, pet insurance, tuition assistance, student loan assistance. They can even be things like a Banana Republic credit card, or discount coupons.
However, you can’t generalize when offering these extra employment benefits. You should talk to each of your writers and get a sense of what they want, what their needs are, and what attracts them the most.
After finding that out, offer them the employment benefits that would most resonate with them. However, give them the option to opt for something, as well.
Develop Compensation Packages
After you have analyzed your employees and gauged their needs, you can start to develop the compensation packages. These can include everything from the employee salary to the bonuses, to the employment benefits, among other things.
Typically, companies tend to make compensation packages for different sets or groups of employees. Nowadays, that’s considered cutting corners. If you truly want to offer your employees value, you need to develop individual compensation packages for them.
While it may seem like you don’t have the time and resources for it. Doing it will show your writers that you care about them. It’s bound to boost their morale and motivation.
Offer, Analyze, Repeat
When you have developed the appropriate compensation packages for all your writers and offered them said packages, you’ll see that they are satisfied. However, the job doesn’t end there.
Now it’s time to analyze the writers, and see how happy they are with their employment benefits. You also need to analyze whether offering all those targeted benefits improved their productivity, efficiency, and quality of work.
This will tell you what you did right and what you did wrong if anything. When you have the answers, you can decide what you are going to do the next year. In-depth, it’ll show you whether you need to offer more benefits, better benefits, improve upon existing benefits, and/or how much will it affect your employees.
In case you see your returns diminishing, at least doing the trial, analysis and repetition method will ensure you eventually get the equation right
The Bottom Line
All in all, choosing the right employment benefits for your writers can be a tedious task, with lots of steps in the process. However, it is worth it in the end because you will always end up with happy and satisfied employees who will appreciate the effort you made. Just make sure you prevent micromanagement and come up with a management system for remote employees.
It is also bound to increase company loyalty and employee retention as this entire process is only followed by a handful of companies. If you can offer writer-specific employment benefits today, you can rest easy knowing your writers will stay loyal to you and your company.
