HR Insights

We all know the importance of a good personal credit score, but you might not know that businesses have an equivalent score determined by employer benefits quality.

A good Employee Benefits Score (EBS) will make these benefits packages a lot more affordable for businesses.

Workplaces across the country are offering a bevy of new voluntary benefits, sometimes including student loan forgiveness, petsitting, and other perks unknown to previous generations.

As good as many of these benefits may be, voluntary benefit participation rates are still very low.

Benefits and perks are obviously high on the priority list when it comes to job hunting. But what industries offer their employees the best benefits?

A study based on data from jobs/recruitment site Glassdoor sought to find out just that.

One thing everyone can agree on is that this summer has been hot. This pretty much holds true wherever you live on planet Earth.

One study from sunny India found that keeping offices cool resulted in a 12% increase in productivity. Similar findings have been demonstrated around the world.

Despite all the hype about student loan repayments as a workplace benefit, only 4% of American businesses presently offer this perk. 40 million Americans carry $1.3 Trillion in student loan debt.

As a talent shortage drags on, businesses in search of rare new skills are the most likely to offer loan repayment.

Workplace wellness incentives can get pretty flashy. We're talking about gift cards, premium savings, and other juicy perks.

But it's possible that these wellness incentives are so generous that they become taxable by the IRS as employee income.

With workplace benefits, it's usually "Out With the Old, In With the New."

While we make a lot out of trendy new benefits like parental leave and work location flexibility, these benefits replace trusty old benefits our parents used to enjoy.

Among these are some real doozies: mortgage assistace, subsidized childcare, credit union membership, and more. These benefits aren't totally extinct, but most will be lucky to find them.

In a recent piece for EBN, Andrea Davis sums up her thinking on workplace benefits and employee happiness.

Highlighting new statistical understandings of the correlation between workplace flexibility and productivity (it's high!) and the importance of happiness, Davis zeroes in on her retention conclusion.

A large study indicates that 1/3 of employees would prefer to work at a company where Business Casual attire was the norm.

Just over 20% of American companies allow casual dress every day of the week.

But in a growing result-orientation in American company culture, more businesses are admitting that the way people dress might not have much to do with their productivity.

More American companies are starting to offer paid parental leave for mothers and fathers. Notable examples include Etsy and Netflix, the latter of which offers a full paid year to new parents.

And while this is a great victory for working parents, studies show that men are less likely to take advantage of parental leave than women.