Understanding your company benefits will lead to improved talent attraction, retention and engagement
Ask any business owner about their priorities and concerns and undoubtedly retaining employees in a competitive talent marketplace will feature pretty high up on their list.
Understanding your company benefits will lead to improved talent attraction, retention and engagement
The cost of staff turnover within the media and advertising sectors is around £184 million, with hiring and wages paid whilst the employee gets to their optimum productivity level costing per replacement employee slightly below £26,000 on average. As the digital economy continues to grow and with candidates having more job options available to them, it’s more important than ever that leaders place their employee’s experience is placed at the heart of their business.
What can you as a business do to better understand, engage and retain your talent?
Whilst we’ve seen a trend in hiring someone with a title such as “Director of Employee Experience” over the past few years, understanding the benefits that are important to staff and packaging them in a sensible way is crucial to employee engagement and retention. At Sphere, recently released the results from our Employee Benefits Survey which sought to identify and understand what benefits companies provided and whether they were valued. The survey focused on employees and employers across our key sectors; Ad Tech/Mar Tech, Media Owner/Publisher, Agency and Brand/Client-side.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, 92% of respondents across the sample told us that benefits were either important or very important and 94% believed they affect their decisions to either join a new company or stay in their current employment. 38% were more likely to join one company over another based upon whether they provided employee with a great benefits package, with the three most popular benefits home working, bonus and healthcare. this was relatively consistent across all industry sector and company size
Over a quarter of respondents (27%) felt there wasn’t an active focus on benefits within their company, and this feeling was highest amongst employees working within brands. Additionally, 10% were more concerned with basic pay than their benefits package and 17% believed that employee benefits weren’t as important as other areas when it came to their engagement with their company.
So, what benefits should you be offering your staff?
Do they want flexible working? Paternity leave? Gym membership? Through asking or surveying your staff you’ll gain a true understanding of what your employees actually want and be able package them in a way that works best for your business. Often, it’s about striking the right balance between harder and softer benefits to retain and engage employees.
Worryingly, one-third of the companies we asked had no formal review process for their benefits. 30% of agencies had no formal structure in place for review, the highest across the four sectors surveyed.
Speaking with business leaders regularly about the benefits they offer, my advice is always that they need to be open and transparent in order both to retain and attract staff. It is also vital that they have a regular review process in place to stay up-to-date with their employee’s needs – something we’re proud of at Sphere. It’s important to think about how the benefits on offer align with your company culture and values and how this is communicated to your employees and throughout your hiring process.
If you’d like some advice on benefits you can offer, ways to retain and engage your employees or hiring top-tier talent then please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.
Ed Steer, CEO, Sphere Digital Recruitment.
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Sphere Digital Recruitment
We recruit for digital jobs in digital media, creative, marketing and content. Our clients are ad technology providers, brands and agencies
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