Carrying on the theme of love, we are moving up the ladder and we want you to show you love your managers. It would be easy to assume that managers, who are often in the mid-stages of their careers with homes and families, are good at managing their money and everything else in their lives. But being older and having more responsibilities doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing when it comes to life or money.
What’s the issue?It’s not just your younger employees that could do with some more support from you. For example, many employers provide some kind of childcare benefit and many managers do have children. But just providing the benefit doesn’t mean they’re going use it or even understand how it works. You probably offer a range of benefits, some of which are easy to understand, like gym memberships, but some which might be more complicated, like Pensions for example. It’s important to provide the benefits that you do, but it’s more important that your employees understand how to use them. What’s more is that managers are a key way to disseminate information throughout your workforce; if they know how a benefit works and can tell people how great it is, word will spread quickly. So taking care of your managers is another way to help you take care of the rest of your workforce. Providing benefits and education to understand them is a great way to support your staff, but is it enough?
What can you do?Employers are well placed to provide their employees with education on how their benefits work – this is beneficial for employees as well as employers as it makes investment in the benefits you offer worthwhile. What’s even better though is helping employees to understand where benefits fit in their life and financial plans. The assumption that employers make is that employees can afford to use all of the fantastic benefits on offer because they’re usually very cost effective. However, your managers are likely to have many financial responsibilities which they see as higher priority than workplace benefits.
So how do you help your managers to make the most of their benefits? You need to go to the root of the problem to help them see that they can afford the benefits you offer by being better with money and having some to spare. Educating employees on finances means they can get the skills they need to manage their money, learn how to budget, be able to cut back and have money to spare at the end of the month. Money management is a vital skill that managers in your company may have missed out on. Providing your employees with this kind of support shows them that they are valued, so they will be more motivated and engaged at work, and more likely to stay with you as a result.
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