As a small business owner, you’re probably wondering what you need to do in order to attract, satisfy and of course, retain top talent in today’s day an age. The answer to that question is rather simple really… You just need to provide a good benefits package…

Two years ago, when Glassdoor conducted their Employment Confidence Survey, it was revealed that more than 60% of employee think that perks and benefits play the biggest role in decision whether to accept or refuse a job. In addition, the survey also discovered that 80% of workers would choose benefits over a raise…

And you don’t even need a survey to see this fact, there are examples of how much an employee benefits package means to people across all industries. For instance, Google is known for its generous perks, some of which include meals made by a professional chef, haircuts and yoga classes….

And that’s not the only example… We also have Twitter that lets its employees enjoy three catered meals every day and acupuncture. SAS has a full-fledged scholarship program for children of their employees… So on and so forth…

What Can a Small Business Offer?

The real issues is, with all of those larger-than life benefits, how can even small companies compete for top employees? Logically, if you can’t afford Twitter- or Google-sized perks, you’ll be left only with average candidates that won’t help your company progress…

However, you don’t actually need to spend a ton of money to offer attractive benefits. Recently, Fractl conducted a survey, which discovered that after health benefits, a vast majority of modern employees value benefits that are relatively cheap like paid vacation time, flexible working hours and telecommuting…

And if that’s not enough, recent studies have discovered that some benefits can win over some candidates faced with higher-paying offers, which come with less advantages. So in order to help you attract all of those job seekers, let’s like at the top five perks…

Top Four Employee Benefits, Requests and Trends

1.    Health Benefits and Personal Welfare

For starters, according to a joint study conducted by Colonial Life and the Society for Human Resource Management, over the last five years, companies across all industries have been offering their employees mental health, contraceptive and bariatric benefits over the last 5 years. On the other hand, the same companies have decreased the amount of retired health care coverage and HRA offered to former workers.

In essence, this means that increasingly more employees have been seeking benefits to cover their busy lifestyles. What’s more, you could also decrease your health care costs by offering preventive health programs for your employees. Some companies out there, for instance, have started offering money bonuses and even non-cash benefits for people who meet their annual health and wellness goals…

2.    Absence Benefits

Absence benefit is one of the most important perks workers are looking for these days – especially if were talking about maternity leave. One of the main reasons behind this is that medical researchers have demonstrated positive effects when both parents are able to spend some time with their newborns. And last year, most companies have shown major improvements in their maternity and paternity leave policies.

Everyone from Ikea to American Express announced generous parental leave for their employees. And if you start introduce a new leave policy and start offering job candidates a good number of paid days off, your company will definitely seem like an attractive option for most top candidates. According to recently released government figure, only around 12% of employees in the private sector actually have access to paid parental leave…

3.    Relocation Benefits

In the period from 2010 to 2014, this benefit category significantly decreased, however, in 2015, employers started once again routinely offering temporary relocation assistance and spouse relocation benefits to their employees. According to Atlas Van Lines’ recently released Annual Corporate Relocation Survey, around 26% of companies in the US have moved some of their workers in 2015.

Now, you need to realize that most workers aren’t willing to move and switch residence for a new job or even move if their current company decides to move the headquarters to another city. Nonetheless, these benefits are highly valued by employees across the country who are actually willing to change their residence because of a new job…

4.    Flexibility and Remote Working

As Incentive and Motivation reports, according to a recent Future of Work report from Grass Roots, things like free gym memberships and even extra days off are now overlooked on favor of the ability to work flexibly. As a matter of fact, almost 50% of the survey respondents cited working flexible working hours as a top priority…

Unlike the previous generation, millennials want to have a lot more flexibility in their schedules and they don’t want work to dominate their personal lives. Instead they want to lead fruitful family and social lives outside of work. But with recent tech advancements, you have platforms that allow team collaboration, even when a couple of your team member are working from home…

Final Thoughts

It will definitely be interesting to see what the next couple of years will bring in terms of employee benefits. Some types of benefits will surely grow in demand while other will completely fall of the map. The point is, if you want to create an attractive package, you need to pay special attention to these trends in the future…

And the truth is, there are many more employee benefits that could’ve been included on the list – including, but not limited to child care subsides, company discounts and even flexible spending accounts. So before you start creating a clear benefits package, you should do some additional research or even survey your current employees to see what they really want, besides a raise…