3 Benefits Canadian Employees Love
Are you a small business owner looking to make your employee compensation go farther? With a tight labour market and high cost inflation, here are three ways to do just that.
Canadian Workers Love Work From Home
If you want to get (and keep) the best people, remote work options are increasingly part of the negotiation. Especially if your city has sub-optimal transit options and/or high gas prices (like in Winnipeg, where we’re based), eliminating a twice-a-day commute can go a long ways.
Of course, not all jobs are conducive to remote-work. But in skillsets where remote work is an option, not offering such a thing to your employee could mean she goes somewhere else.
Lastly, if you’re still not convinced, make sure you consider the benefits to yourself as an employer. Over the long run you will save on rent and, depending on the role, you might have the option to hire from anywhere in the world.
Flex That Flex-Time
In a service-based knowledge-economy like Canada’s, flexible working hours are increasingly popular. And like remote-work, this employee benefit is becoming more important to the exact sort of people you want to work for your organization. Not offering some sort of flexibility runs you the risk of losing your best employees to those who do.
This being said, flex-time is a potential mine-field of challenges. Customers can fall through the cracks if employees don’t coordinate and creative synergies can suffer if teams are always working at different hours. If you can put the right systems in place though, flexible working hours could provide you a golden ticket at the negotiating table and potentially even more productive employees.
Canadian Healthcare Doesn’t Include Health Benefits
It’s easy to forget when you have a private healthcare plan like Blue Cross. But when you’re working at, or considering working at, a job without health benefits, it becomes glaringly obvious. Without good health benefits, a skilled employee will want salary to offset (or at least mitigate) the shortfall in benefits.
One invaluable way to get around this is with a PHSP. Because a PHSP is a tax-free benefit to the employee, the expense to you (as the employer) will be less. Put it this way: whatever the government would have gotten off of your employee’s salary increase will instead stay with the you, while your employee will receive the exact same benefit (i.e. they’ll have their medical expenses covered).