A male employee working from home
Employee Benefits

Attracting and Retaining Employees in a Tight Labor Market

Jeff Kirke
Jeff Kirke
Vice President, Employee Benefits

With unemployment rates at historic lows, every employer likely has employees top of mind. Will you be able to attract the talent you need? Can you keep the skilled employees you have? The short answer is yes — if you are strategic and follow through on things that matter.

Employees Quitting at a Rapid Rate

In a tight market, you must work harder for quality employees that represent your company well. Worker availability can also affect plans for growth. In the tightest labor market in history, workers continue to quit their jobs at a rapid rate. In surveys conducted by ZipRecruiter, it’s clear that people who are quitting their jobs are not quitting the labor force. Rather, they are quitting for better jobs that offer more employee benefits.

Finding and Keeping the Right Employees

Even with the tight labor market, you can find and keep good people. One of the biggest ways is by investing in things that make your business special to employees. Think about things you can control like your culture, mission, and purpose.

Additionally, employees want to work for companies that have great employee benefits packages. The right benefits package goes a long way in keeping and attracting employees. Here’s the thing, though. You actually need to provide benefits that employees want. Offering a benefits package with tons of benefits that are just flashy, but employees aren’t interested in, won’t do you any good.

So, how can you discover what employees actually want? Here are two of many tools Holmes Murphy uses to find what fits perfectly for your employee benefits offerings.

The first is with our ethOs team. This team consults with HR teams on company culture and existing benefits to pinpoint exactly what makes your company great to work for. They’ll also help you implement strategies to strengthen your offerings and organizational engagement.

The second is with Take Command Health. Take Command Health is a program that provides  your employees tax-advantaged cash, so they can purchase the insurance plan that works best for them giving them more choice and satisfaction.

Beyond that, we have many other strategies to improve your employee benefits offerings and strengthen your company culture. If you’d like to talk through all the options or simply have questions on which packages will help in your retaining and recruitment efforts while providing the benefits employees actually want, reach out to us! We’ve been monitoring this issue closely and can help your company provide the benefits your employees want.

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