Tag Archives: work from home

8 Things to Include in Your Work From Home Benefits Plan

If your team has gone remote due to COVID-19, you already know how difficult it can be to make sure employees are feeling valued and appreciated. Even though employees are saving time on their commute, studies have shown that, on average, the lockdown workday is 48.5 minutes longer. Which means it’s more important than ever for employers to get creative when it comes to commending their team’s hard work. Including a Work From Home Plan as part of your benefits package can help you make sure your remote employees are being rewarded for their efforts.

Here are 8 things to include in your Work From Home Benefits Plan:

1. Monthly Lunch Stipend for Managers

Pre-COVID, many companies would have perks like free lunches a few times a month. Company-wide lunches aren’t feasible in the current climate however, giving managers a monthly lunch stipend to treat their team to take-out or delivery meals is a great way to ensure team members feel appreciated.

2. Delivery Lunch for Employee of the Month

In the same vein, you may not be able to take your star employees out for a one-on-one meal but you could surprise them with a Postmates or UberEats gift card so they can treat themselves.

3. Monthly Coffee & Tea Stipend

Gearing up for the day by sipping on coffee with your co-workers is a delightful aspect of working in an office. Keep the caffeinated delight going by sending employees monthly credit to a coffee shop or coffee bean subscription service.

4. Virtual Gym Membership

It’s easy to get so overloaded when working from home that employees aren’t incentivized to move, which can be detrimental to their overall health. Since most gyms are currently closed or limited, offering a virtual gym membership can help keep your team healthy and happy. Hosting a group Zoom class with a certified instructor could be a fun way to keep each other motivated and give employees permission to step away from their emails in order to work out.

5. Mental Health App Subscription

Lockdown can be especially difficult for people who are living alone—people across the country are struggling with feeling isolated and depressed. Long-term, this can mean employees feel unmotivated, listless, and less productive. Including a mental health app like TalkSpace for therapy or Headspace for meditation in your Work From Home plan will help employees stay on top of their mental health.

6. Telemedicine and Wellness Checks

Telemedicine has been growing in popularity the past few years, for good reason—it can reduce medical costs and save patients a trip to the clinic or hospital. Now with the pandemic in full swing in the US, telemedicine has exploded in popularity and it’s helping people across the country keep hospital waiting rooms clear for COVID-19 patients while limiting their own exposure to the virus.

7. Wifi or Cell Phone Bill Reimbursement

Instead of using a company phone line or logging onto office internet, employees are taking on the burden of these expenses themselves. Consider offering reimbursement for a percentage of their home internet or cell phone bill to offset the expenditure.

8. Send a Care Package

When it comes to care packages, a little bit of thought goes a long way. Whether you’re sending special company swag or a customized basket of their favorite snacks, getting a little something at their door can help employees feel connected to company culture even when they’re working from home.

BONUS

If your employees live locally, take a few hours to show up (masked-up, of course) to their door with a thoughtful physical gift or care package. The personal touch of seeing their boss in person, even from a distance, can be incredibly meaningful.

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Need help doing an Employee Benefits Audit? Email us at marketing@www.corpstrat.com.

Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment: Company Culture

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In order to create and maintain great company culture, employers are focused on ensuring their staff is motivated, team-oriented, and happy to stay with the company for the long haul. A mere six months ago, this meant company culture was all about happy hours, off-site team outings, and in-office communication and rapport. Essentially, creating ways for employees to interact with one another in positive ways, both within and outside of a work context. Cut to today: employees are no longer in shared spaces, teams can’t gather for meetings or activities, and all communication occurs virtually. Read on as we discuss how to maintain company culture when the workplace landscape has transformed so drastically.

The Danger

Zoom meeting fatigue. Lowered productivity. Ineffective communication. Unmotivated team members. These are all the dangers that occur when teams go remote. Underlying all these symptoms is the larger problem: company culture may be at risk of dying. As teams around the world are planning to stay remote for the foreseeable future, the question on everyone’s mind is: how can you maintain company culture in a remote environment?

How to Avoid

Everything we’ve mentioned so far may sound dire, but we promise there are ways to adapt your company culture so it can thrive even in a remote environment. Some of these tweaks may not alter things overnight, we all have to work together to gradually adapt to our changing world. However, our aim is to help you develop a mindset so you can find creative solutions to kickstart your company culture in these uncertain times.

Our first suggestion is to have meetings with meaning. It makes sense why many people find giant, 20+ person Zoom meetings exhausting—it’s hard to focus, they have to constantly fight to be heard, and technical errors can make meetings run long. Our solution is to get creative, perhaps you can break your team into smaller pods. Then you can keep larger team meetings succinct and smaller pods can break out into separate meetings in which they can feel seen and heard and be given clear instructions. This way, employees can feel more comfortable asking questions and continue building rapport.

Second, never underestimate the power of employee feedback. We know employers are doing everything in their power to maintain culture but blindspots occur despite the best intentions. It may be scary but don’t hesitate to ask your employees about what’s working and what’s not. Their honest feedback can illuminate seemingly small issues, which you can address before they become problematic.

Opportunity

Just because you’re not in the office anymore, doesn’t mean the old office shenanigans can’t still be in play. Some of the goofy and fun things you used to do can be translated into a virtual environment. For example, if you used to buy the employee of the month lunch, send them a meal via a delivery service like GrubHub or Postmates. If managers used to grab coffee with their team members, give them a monthly coffee stipend from Starbucks that they can use to send drinks to their team. When we’re all apart, small acts of care can go a long way. Also, keep having fun! During team meetings, play a game like “Two Truths and a Lie” so you can continue getting to know each other and not have every interaction be solely about work.

Tip

Have fun with it and be easy on yourself. We all have enough going on, especially right now. Bring some good positive energy to the group and take care of your employees. In turn, you’ll continue to have a motivated, hard-working team that enjoys working with one another.

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See how CorpStrat can help you transform your Company Culture. Contact us at marketing@www.corpstrat.com.

Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment: The Benefit Package

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It’s hard to believe that just a few short months ago, our country’s unemployment rate was at an all time low. Pre-pandemic, keeping employees happy often involved pricey company perks like free gourmet lunches, massages, and elite gym memberships. Now because of COVID-19, our entire world has changed: unemployment is soaring and non-essential teams have gone remote (and may remain remote). The entire US workforce and workplace has dramatically changed, which means what we offer our employees in terms of benefits has to undergo a dramatic change as well. Today we’ll go over creative solutions to help shift your benefits package to suit the new economic environment.

The Danger

For employers, it’s absolutely vital to alter your current benefits package in order to adapt to the current economic climate. Choosing not to do so could leave your company in the dust. In the coming months, as companies begin cautiously opening up offices and rehiring, they’ll face the challenge of potential employees viewing these slimmed down benefit packages as weak. It’s important to strike the right balance of not overspending in this new normal, while maintaining an attractive benefits package. We’ve also found that many employers cut spending in the wrong places because they aren’t aware of important tax opportunities and fail to take advantage of them.

How to Avoid

A lot of employers have been spending over 80% of the employees’ health insurance premiums on expensive plans. You can still offer full health coverage but switching down to silver plans in lieu of gold can cut costs by as much as 20%. Health insurance is a big line item on most employer’s profit and losses statements. It’s typically in the top three, right behind rent and salaries. Being able to change employer contributions and trim 20% out of employer costs is a huge opportunity right now.

At the same time inexpensive benefit plans can be added with minimal to no cost. Employees value plans like dental, vision, life insurance, and employer sponsored disability insurance. Plans that feature these can help employers round out their offerings without being a high cost item.

At the end of the day, don’t sell your benefits package short. Sometimes offering an appealing benefits package is all about how it’s presented. Creating a benefits brochure that points out both the obvious and hidden benefits offered can help current and potential employees understand the full scope of their benefits package.

There is also another great tool called a hidden paycheck. What a hidden paycheck statement does is give the employee an overview of all the money that the employer is spending on them—like taxes, health insurance, retirement plans, and other fringe benefits. For example, if an employee makes $60,000 a year, there’s a good probability they are only pocketing $3,500 a month. On this employee’s hidden paycheck statement, they would see everything the employer is spending on them, often totaling up to as much as $80,000 a year. Employees can then gain a greater sense of their value to the company rather than looking at their $3,500 take home pay.

Opportunity

The opportunity here is to modify plans and contributions based on the current economic environment. Get creative in building your benefit package, use voluntary plans, use ancillary plans, and lastly, shift employee perks to support work from home needs.

You’ll find that many of the traditional perks like company lunches, free snacks in the office, or commuter stipends, are no longer useful, and won’t be viewed favorably. Shifting perks to include things like virtual fitness memberships, mental health and telemedicine, wellness checks, childcare options, are what employees will value going forward.

Finally and maybe most importantly is adding a work from home policy in your benefits package. Many teams have gone remote without a noticeable drop in productivity. This means employees both know it’s possible to work efficiently from home and want to continue working from home. Including a work from home policy in the benefit package is going to be vital for most employers going forward to continue to attract top talent.

Tip

As we mentioned at the beginning, this is not a one size fits all. There’s no cookie cutter or plug and play approach, every industry and every situation is going to be unique. It’s important for employers to work with someone who can bring fresh ideas, understand the market, understand the industry and can bring real solutions.

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See how CorpStrat can help you transform your Employee Benefits Package. Contact us at marketing@www.corpstrat.com.

Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment: The New HR Department

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In these unprecedented times, employers are forced to make difficult decisions around how much of their team they can sustainably keep on. Unfortunately, when teams working remotely, the first department that seems easiest to trim down is the HR department. Once the HR department is eliminated or whittled down, it leaves employers without the tools or resources they need to navigate the pandemic and vulnerable to litigation. Before eliminating your HR department outright, we’d advise seeking out creative solutions that can help keep the functional use of your HR team while keeping within your budget.

The Danger

Google can not replace a trained HR professional. Which of us hasn’t quickly typed an HR or payroll question into Google and found the answer that we needed? But be warned, Google is good until it’s not. Letting Google be your HR department can easily lead to large claims and getting sued by employees.

The employee/employer environment is as litigious as ever, making the wrong moves can come back to bite you. Add a pandemic with constantly updating rules and regulations to the mix and you have a real recipe for disaster. In our future post-COVID world, many employees who have exhausted unemployment may look for ways to get more compensation which could lead them to file claims against former employers.

How to Avoid

Don’t fire your HR team. It sounds simple but many business owners are trying to save every dollar they can and when making difficult cuts, HR can seem non-essential in the short run. This couldn’t be further from the truth, we believe it may be the most vital time in the history of your business to have a strong HR person(s). With so many new regulations, you need a trained HR professional to help you navigate the complex policies. Trust us, it will ultimately save you a ton of time, frustration, and money.

The Opportunity

Right now is the time to make sure you have all your ducks in a row by completing an HR audit. Even if you still have a full-time HR person, a CorpStrat HR representative can help you take a good look at your HR infrastructure, discover any vulnerabilities, and find ways to improve on it. In times of crisis, it’s important to find creative, sustainable solutions. For example, if you can’t afford to keep on your entire HR department during the pandemic, there may be a way to combine fewer HR team members with an HR outsourcing firm to maximize efficiency and stay financially viable.

CorpStrat Tip:

Hire a good labor law attorney—it’s worth the added expense. A good labor law attorney can help employers avoid a lot of headaches. Many business owners hire HR consulting firms and assume that they are compliant but not all HR consulting firms are created equal. Without a labor law attorney, you could unknowingly be overlooking important legal documents and leave yourself open to litigation. This is why we’ve included unlimited phone and email support with a labor law attorney in our CorpStrat HR Plus and Pro services.

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Interested in a full HR audit? Schedule a call with a CorpStrat agent: marketing@www.corpstrat.com

Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment: Workforce Automation

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There’s no doubt about it: our workplaces are going to look very different post-COVID-19. This might mean keeping some of your team remote indefinitely, changing the layout of your offices, or switching up your workflow to fall in line with health and safety guidelines. We can’t force things back to how they were but we can focus on setting you and your employees up for success in the “new normal”.

A few weeks ago, we gave a webinar on “Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment” in which we shared how companies can streamline their HR processes and maintain company culture. We’re excited to bring you the webinar in four parts: Workforce Automation, the New HR, Benefit Package and Company Culture.

Part 1: Workforce Automation

According to Capterra, 91% of professionals who work at small and medium sized businesses say workforce automation software is crucial, but almost 58% of them are not using it. That’s a huge gap. In our post-COVID-19 new normal, we believe more teams will adopt work from home policies which will make automated HR management software even more necessary.

The Danger

What’s the danger of not having a workforce automation system? Companies have done it the old-fashioned way with paper for over 50 years. What’s the fuss?

The reality is too many things can fall through the cracks. The fact is, relying on paper processes when you have a remote team becomes inefficient very quickly. A simple paid time off (PTO) request can mean piles of paperwork, redundant requests, and scrambling to calculate accrued balances—all leaving opportunities for potential oversight. With the technology available today, it’s a no-brainer to make the switch to an automated workforce system. With an automated system in place, your employees can submit a paperless request via their self-service portal, their time gets deducted, and it automatically updates in payroll.

How to Avoid

Help your employees help you by giving them self-service logins that allow them to access and edit their information. There’s a dual-sided benefit: if employees are able to make edits to their W4, change their address, view and sign items, submit PTO requests, and enroll in benefit plans, then they’ll feel empowered AND it will relieve the stress of managing manual processes.

The Opportunity

In addition to making things run more smoothly, there’s also an opportunity to eliminate potential lawsuits. Instead of worrying that employees can cite “you never told me”, you can keep track of everything in one database. This ensures nothing gets lost in the mix. Integrating employee lifecycle events into one system means that events are readily accessible at all times.

CorpStrat Tip:

We’ve seen many employers embrace workforce automation, but only in part. The market is filled with systems that offer piecemeal solutions: some just do new employee on-boarding, others only do benefit enrollment. Adopting separate services that don’t work together creates more manual work for your team.

We think employers should focus on making sure to streamline all employee lifecycle events into a single database that connects payroll and employee benefits into one system and has a powerful mobile application.

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Interested in streamlining your workforce automation? Schedule a call with a CorpStrat agent: info@www.corpstrat.com