What are Flexi Benefits & Should My Company Offer Them?

If you’ve been around HR discussions and forums in recent times, you’ll be familiar with flexible benefits — or at least, you’d have heard of the term being thrown about with increasing regularity. 

But what are they? How do they benefit your employees? What about pros & cons for HR strategies, and the overall organisation as a whole? Should you implement flexible benefits at your company? And how do you execute the whole process? 

We’ve a quick, concise, but comprehensive guide here — exclusive to altHR’s HR Resources blog.

What are Flexible/Flexi Benefits? 

Traditionally, benefits that are offered to employees on top of their basic salaries are fixed plans. This means that they are generally designed to be part of a balanced package that would appeal to a wide range of employees, including benefits such as medical coverage, insurance, as well as allowances for transport and other expenses. 

With flexible benefits, also known as flexi benefits, employees are given the versatility to customise their benefits packages at the company. While the arrangement will differ from company to company, HR departments and employers generally offer a wide range of benefits to choose from, with employees then given a certain quota to fill with regards to their benefits plans. 

These will ultimately allow each employee to tailor the package to suit their individual needs. As such, with the wide demographic of professionals at many companies, it’s crucial to remember each and every employee will have varying needs and wants at a company. 

Pros & Cons of Flexi Benefits

So, should you offer flexible benefits at your company? Here is a quick list of the upsides (and potential downsides) of flexi benefits: 

Pros:

1. Improved employee recruitment and retention rates

Global trends like The Great Resignation affecting employee retention rates in recent years — a process that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with employees now arguably prioritising flexibility and personal well-being above all else, it’s important to offer the right combination of benefits in order to attract (and retain) the very best talents at your organisation. 

Improved recruitment and retention rates will also reduce the costs associated with replacing existing employees, ultimately adding to a host of beneficial outcomes for organisations with flexi benefits. 

2. Reduces the need for guesswork

Rather than spending time (and money!) trying to design a competitive benefits package, flexi benefits packages remove the need for any sort of guesswork. Instead, employers and HR practitioners can focus their time on other business objectives — while resting assured that employees have access to the benefits that they need most. 

3. Happier employees

At altHR, we like to say that a company’s most important asset is its people. Keeping employees happy and fulfilled is a key element of business success, and in general, happy employees translates to better individual performance at work. This, consequently, improves overall business performance. 

And of course, offering the right benefits — on top of competitive remuneration, and a host of other HR-related policies (read more about it here) — is key to keeping your employees happy. 

Cons:

The main downside to offering flexi benefits is the occasional difficulty in effectively implementing policies. Challenges include the time and resources taken to design a flexible benefits plan — which can be tedious without the right sort of tools in place. 

Flexible benefits can also be rather costly to offer. These costs mainly centre around technology (or simply time) required to manage flexible benefits packages.

However, with the right digital tools in place, flexi benefits can be a hugely powerful tool for your company. This brings us to…