Give employees the gift of better benefits

Long story short: Give employees the gift of better benefits

December 3, 2021 11:10 AM

With so many benefits to offer your employees, how do you know which ones matter most?

As employers take stock of the past year, employee benefits have helped teams weather the storms of uncertainty. From financial wellness services to get employees on the right financial foot, to robust family planning benefits that help employees grow their future and expanded paid time off to encourage employee well-being, there are endless opportunities and options to provide support.

In this week’s top stories, over twenty top employers boosted their employee benefits this year, offering a wide array of innovative offerings. At Bank of America, their robust family benefits package allowed Miyoshi Lee and her husband to pursue their dream of a family. After struggling with infertility for years, the Lees used BofA’s benefit package to adopt their two children.

What benefits will you offer in 2022? See how these options can make a difference in the stories below:

23 companies that boosted their benefits in 2021

Employers and employees continued to adjust to a new world of work in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic this past year. Employers seemed up to the task, launching new and improved benefits that support the health and well-being of their teams.

Employers including Amazon, Walmart and Goldman Sachs all updated their benefits in 2021 to focus on innovative solutions to the complexities of their employees’ needs. See how these top employers navigated 2021 and what’s in store for 2022.

Read more:

23 companies that boosted their benefits in 2021

Benefits in Action: How Bank of American helped this employee adopt her children

Miyoshi Lee, a director and U.S. head of real time payments at Bank of America, never expected she would have trouble getting pregnant. But after she and her husband spent several years trying to have a baby on their own with no success, she realized it was time to get some help.

One of the first places Lee turned? Her employer. Bank of America has a generous family planning benefits program that provides guidance, support, insurance coverage for fertility treatments and up to $20,000 in reimbursements. All of this helped Lee adopt her two children: a daughter in 2019 and a son whose adoption was finalized just in time for Thanksgiving of 2021.

Read more:

Benefits in Action: How Bank of America helped this employee adopt her children

To boost holiday productivity, give your employees more time off

With

holiday celebrations

, endless shopping lists and end-of-year plans in sight, the last thing on your employees’ minds is work. While this may make managers want to double down on productivity targets, it could be better to simply let go of expectations and accept that employees are more distracted than usual.

While it’s important to motivate your employees to do their best work, if employers know that the majority of their employees

plan to take PTO

during the holiday season, it may make more sense to close the office entirely, and focus on the effort earlier in the month.

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To boost holiday productivity, give your employees more time off

How certified financial therapists can help employees manage their money and mental health

Financial wellness and mental health support are two of the hottest benefits to emerge from pandemic lockdowns, layoffs, furloughs and an unhinged labor market. What better time than the present to merge the two?

Certified financial therapy focuses on emotional reactions to money and how those reactions can affect someone’s overall wellness. Certified financial therapists (CFTs) step beyond the number-crunching of certified financial planners and registered investment advisers, probing the causes and cures associated with financial worries.

Read more:

How certified financial therapists can help employees manage their money and mental health