How to bolster pay without increasing your wage bill

As the cost of living crisis bites, there are easy and low cost ways to add to benefits you already offer employees

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With inflation in double digits, the cost of living crisis is set to get worse before it gets any better. So it’s more important than ever to think about different ways to help employees with their finances.

Balancing the books is getting harder and harder and we want to do what we can to support our people.

Everyone has different needs but there are several things you can do and some of them don’t have any cost.

Saving on commuting costs

For a start, a flexible hybrid work model, where people can work in the office when they want to or work from home, helps them save money on commuting.

You can also add perks to the benefits that you already offer and are paying for – like the Yu Life app which covers life insurance and income protection, gives access to a virtual GP, and lets people collect Yu Coin which can be exchanged for things like Amazon vouchers or a donation to charity.

Reviewing benefits

At Cushon we have reviewed our benefits to see what we can improve and have taken steps to launch medical insurance and increase our employer pension. Supporting healthy saving habits, we also contribute to employees’ Cushon ISAs. We are soon to launch a discounts platform so our employees can save money on day-to-day shopping as well.

We want to help create a better balance for our people with their spending, such as still saving for life events and life after work (retirement) despite increasing gas and electricity costs.

Saving for retirement is really important. A lot of our research has shown that people don’t have enough in savings, which is worrying and we want to do as much as we can to help them.

Never stop learning

Adding in extras to other benefits and focusing on learning and development are also key to making sure the holistic value proposition is the best it can be – learning from others in our business doesn’t have to cost anything – and we have brilliant people that can share their knowledge to help others develop.

We are also striving to make sure that our workers have a voice (via our Cushon Pulse survey), have people to talk to if they need to (via our employee assistance programme) and we run financial education webinars.

There is no magic ingredient for helping everyone, but a combination of all of the things we are doing means we can provide everyone with something that they need when they need it – as this year doesn’t look like it’s improving from a cost perspective.