When it comes to benefits, employers are finally seeing their ultimate place in the ecosystem. It’s something akin to older brothers – someone bigger, stronger and with more clout, who can mobilise and use their resources more effectively than employees, and in doing so get them a bigger, better result.
To understand where this is coming from, we need to start with an employee’s needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a decent framework. Basic needs are catered for by two aspects of modern, Western employment – job security and salary. Money is a golden asset which provides workers with access to food, shelter and resources, the fundamentals of human necessity.
These are transactional needs. Easy to acquire with a clear route to acquisition. As we get further up the scale of needs, you find things that can’t be bought: self-esteem, bodily integrity, mental integrity, friendship, love and belonging, sexual intimacy and self-actualisation. These are abstract concepts that human beings find hard to internalise and assess – there’s no clear path to satisfying these needs.
This is where employers come in. When providing benefits, they have one task: to help employees achieve these things in a way that is quicker and easier than they could do by themselves.
Medical insurance, for example, helps them provide for their family. Access to counselling helps them achieve mental integrity. By providing access to the latest information, employers can help staff get to the grips with the human condition more easily than they can alone.
Businesses that offer these benefits should be happy– they are certainly leading the way in the modern, caring incarnation of the employer.
But as the war for talent intensifies – and it will, as employees develop greater social capital – employees looking to attract the best staff members will need to up their offering even further.
Where will this battle take this place? The answer is self-actualisation, because this is the point where the needs of the average human and the needs of the individual de-merge. What is self-actualisation? Definitions differ, but ultimately it is the desire to achieve one’s full potential. And where this full potential lies differs massively from individual to individual.
Employers will need to stop thinking: what benefits will our employees like? and start thinking what does John want? What does Kirsty truly want in life?
The sheer resources needed to go down this path are considerable. In terms of personnel, I’ve said it before, but we need scientists in HR and we need them now. Because data will drive this process of understanding individual self-actualisation.
If you know what TV shows John likes, you know what issues he cares about, and you know what charities he supports. If you know what hobbies he does, you know how he spends his spare cash. If you know his political persuasion you can – to an extent – predict his viewpoints and desires on a significant number of issues.
And with all this information, you can create an employee benefits package that works for one person and one person only. John.
Then he’ll never want to leave.
