Family-Friendly Benefits Getting Pandemic-Driven Boost
Even before the pandemic, employers were ramping up benefits to attract the best employees in a tight labor market. When COVID-19 arrived, the trend gained new urgency as workers reassessed what they expect from work and life. In addition to prompting The Great Resignation, this reassessment prompted many workers to put greater emphasis on personal lives, family and overall wellness.
Employers are responding by shifting more resources to family-friendly benefits. In fact, a recent report from Willis Towers Watson said that, while nearly 60% of employers point to family-friendly benefits as “important to their talent strategy,” that number likely will climb to 77% in the next three years. And what can employees expect from this shift? Following are some likely areas of impact.
Family-building. Recognizing that families are created in a variety of ways, companies will offer more family-building benefits, including some coverage for adoption services, surrogacy and more.
Family care. Sensitive to the fact that many workers are also caregivers, employers are expanding provisions for families, providing for such things as childcare referrals and back-up childcare, as well as benefits related to the care of other family members, especially those who are aging.
New-parent benefits. Continuing trends that began over the last couple of decades, employers expect to provide more support for new parents, including such things as dedicated rooms for nursing, phased return-to-work programs, greater remote-work flexibility and parent support groups.
Financial support. In recent years, employers have been pushed to include more financial benefits such as budgeting education and student-loan repayment. It’s likely this trend will continue, with more resources put toward options such as life insurance, 529 college-savings plans and scholarships.
Mental health. Mental health has received greater attention in the culture as a whole, but certainly in the workplace, where employers have recognized that mental health issues can have a profound increasing coverage of mental health care but also providing stress-management services, meditation and mindfulness programs and even massage therapy.
General wellness. Employers are increasingly cognizant of the impact workers’ overall well-being can have on their performance, and so are providing for more quality-of-life perks, including greater flexibility around when and where people work, additional paid-time-off options, enhanced use of wellness apps and more on-site spaces dedicated to stress-reduction.
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Tags: benefits, family, pandemic