Startups don't usually have much in the way of allowance for mistakes, at least not while they can still be considered a startup. Your reputation right from the beginning can have a significant impact on how likely you are to be able to make it in the long run. One of the most crucial factors is your ability to attract the best employees. Given how important benefits often are to something like that, it makes sense to think about which ones will make the most difference.
Paid Family Leave
Let’s face it: when it comes to family leave, the United States is woefully behind some other developed countries. Employees today want more than just the 12 weeks of unpaid leave granted to some by FMLA; they want to get paid for it. Can you really blame them? The option to spend quality bonding time with a newborn as a family without having to worry about using up all of your PTO, vacation, and sick leave. Saving enough to cover the cost of living is hard enough without the hard-to-predict expenses associated with having a baby.
A Retirement Plan
Just about anyone will tell you that they have pretty much zero confidence in Social Security being anywhere near enough to cover all their expenses in retirement, even if they live very modestly. That’s why it’s so important to have a retirement plan. When employees are offered retirement plans through their jobs, it’s a lot easier to participate in them and keep setting money aside for retirement. Because not all retirement plans are the same, you’ll need to look carefully at the options to determine which one to offer. For example, a safe harbor 401(k) plan allows you to maintain maximum salary deferrals for highly compensated employees. Roth IRAs don’t come with a tax deduction, but funds that come from them are also generally tax-free.
Flexible Working Conditions
Over the last year or two, some people have found that working for home just isn’t for them. They thrive in an office setting that allows them to more clearly separate work life from home life. Others thrive off of remote working and wanted to continue it even when businesses decided it was time to return to the workplace. If you want to not only attract the best employees, but to enable them to do their best work, offering the option of remote work can be a real selling point. So can offering flextime. That allows the employee to have flexible start and stop times, enabling them to do things like skip rush hour traffic and better balance work life and home life.
Attracting the best employees is often a matter of making sure you’re offering enough as an employer that those employees consider it worth their time and effort to come and work for you. Things like paid family leave, a retirement plan, and flexible working conditions can go a long way towards making sure that your pool of applicants has some real quality candidates. From there, you’ll just need to pick out the ones you want to have as a part of your team.
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