The last three years have been challenging for many employees.

While some may have enjoyed the transition to working from home, others may have missed the camaraderie of connecting with their co-workers in-office and the work/life separation maintained by a physical office. Some may feel fulfilled in their roles, while others may feel like they need to do “more,” whether that’s socially, politically, or something else. And, some may feel secure in their careers, while others feel like they’re quickly being left in the dust in the wake of rapid technological development.

With all of this in mind, the “gimmicky” employee benefits that many companies relied on in the past—pizza lunches, employee lounges, and ping pong tables—may not actually improve employee engagement.

So, which benefits will set you apart as a company that employees want to work for? In this guide, we’ll cover three benefits that modern employees are seeking from their workplaces:

• Skills Training

• Corporate Philanthropy

• Flexible Workspaces

Modern employees want to work for companies that empower them to be better humans overall, whether through training, giving back, or better managing their day-to-day lives. With that in mind, let’s start with the first benefit that employees care about.

Skills Training

For many of your employees, there's a decent chance they've recently needed to develop new skills they didn't have in the past decade, or even the last three years. A few that come to mind include using video conferencing platforms like Zoom, hosting virtual meetings, working effectively from home, navigating new project management systems, or even using new technologies as your industry evolves.

If you thought the past few years have been ripe with innovation, realize that this process is only speeding up. This is why many employees are worried about upskilling in order to keep up with and maintain their current roles.

It’s worthwhile to reevaluate your company’s training curriculum to incorporate more skills training opportunities for employees who want to continue in their professional development journeys. 

How to Incorporate This Benefit Into Your Offerings

The best way to incorporate skills training into your overall training curriculum is to invest in micro-credentials. Skyepack defines micro-credentials as “short, stackable courses that learners—whether students, employees, or organization members—take to develop specific skills in their field.”

Micro-credentials tend to target skills in high-growth fields, such as IT support, project management, UX design, cybersecurity, and digital marketing. They’re often asynchronous, meaning employees can begin a micro-credential and work toward it as it best fits into their personal schedules.

Consider working with an instructional design partner to develop micro-credentials that target key skills that would benefit your employees in their personal professional journeys. This partner can work with your training team to develop the digital course materials for your team.

Corporate Philanthropy

After a few years of social, health, and financial distress across society, many employees are seeking to not only work but to make a positive impact on the world while doing so. They want to work for companies that prioritize giving back and are taking direct action both behind the scenes and publicly to do so.

In response, many companies are embracing corporate philanthropy, defined as “the voluntary actions that businesses take to improve their impact on the environment, their communities, and society at large.” This includes sponsoring and donating to nonprofits, incorporating giving programs into their benefits packages, and incentivizing employees to give back themselves.

How to Incorporate This Benefit Into Your Offerings

There are multiple types of corporate philanthropy programs that you can incorporate into your benefits package. Choose the options that would interest your employees the most and align with your available resources.

Some examples include:

• In-Kind Donations: This involves your company donating products or services to nonprofits, rather than monetary donations. These could be resources (ex: gently used computers that your organization no longer needs), your own products and services (ex: a restaurant catering an event or tickets to an amusement park), or even pro bono services (ex: a marketing agency donating a consultation). To match your company and resources with a nonprofit that aligns well with those offerings, consider using an online donation portal designed for creating such matches.

• Matching Gifts: According to Double the Donation, a matching gift program is “a type of philanthropy in which companies financially match donations that their employees make to nonprofit organizations.” Your organization simply sets the parameters for the program, including the types of nonprofits to which you’ll match, the maximum and minimum donation amounts you’ll match, and the ratio at which you’ll match (ex: one-to-one). Then, you share the opportunity with employees.

• Volunteer Grants: These are very similar to matching gifts, except the donation your company makes corresponds to the number of volunteer hours an employee serves at a qualified nonprofit. For this program, you set the parameters for the types of nonprofits, the maximum and minimum volunteer hours, and the financial amount corresponding to the hour amounts. For example, you might pledge to make a $250 donation for every 25 hours worked.

• Run/Walk/Ride Sponsorships: This program is fairly straightforward and involves your company paying registration fees for employees who choose to participate in Run/Walk/Ride events.

Regardless of which type(s) of corporate philanthropy you choose to incorporate into your benefits offerings, the most important thing is communicating it to your employees. That way, they can see that your company prioritizes supporting local organizations and giving back—something that many employees are looking for values-wise.

Flexible Workspaces

Your company may have sent employees to work from home due to the uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. When that change happened, and then was extended, employees saw that their work experience could look different than the standard 9 am to 5 pm, in-office tradition.

Now, as offices are reopening, there’s a constant back-and-forth between companies that want a more traditional culture and employees seeking more autonomy over their work weeks from both location and scheduling perspectives. As the conflict evolves, many employers are realizing that a balance of the two priorities is key.

How to Incorporate This Benefit Into Your Offerings

Incorporating this benefit will look drastically different across companies. Begin by examining your long-term business goals, company culture, and work product. Aim to understand what level of flexibility would be possible for your organization when all of these factors are taken into account.

Here are a few examples, listed from most to least flexible:

• A fully work-from-home schedule with flexible working hours. This is built on the idea that as long as deliverables are completed in a timely manner, scheduling is less relevant.

• A hybrid model with designated in-office days. This option gives employees the best of both worlds when it comes to working in-office with colleagues and from home.

• A return to the office with increased flexibility in scheduling. This could mean allowing employees to “reallocate” hours across the week if they need to leave early or come in late one day. For example, an employee might leave three hours early on a Friday afternoon but come in early on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to make up for the time lost.

The strategy you choose could be a combination of multiple examples or none of the above. The most important thing is that you define what flexible looks like for your specific company and then clearly communicate it to employees.

For the past three years, your employees have been functioning with the uncertainty of if they were returning to the office and if so, when. The last thing you want to do is give them a vague pronouncement of flexibility and then not clearly communicate what that means. When you communicate the parameters of your new policies, employees will be able to create their own schedules within it.

Benefits are directly tied to employee engagement, satisfaction, and long-term retention. However, the days of pizza-driven employee appreciation efforts are in the past!

These three benefits target what employees truly care about—self-improvement, philanthropy, and flexibility. Consider how they could fit into your overall benefits package to stand out from the crowd of companies trying to work with your top talent!