For leading retail employers, keeping your workforce productive, engaged and healthy is a tall order. As an HR professional looking ahead this year, you might be wondering - "how can I help build my employer brand, and promote employee wellbeing?"

Retail employers are starting to offer new, impactful benefits to attract and retain an increasingly diverse workforce. With holistic health in mind, employee's total rewards packages now include support for all pillars of their wellbeing.

Here are the top 4 benefits every retail company can consider this year to stay competitive and keep their workforce well.

1. Financial Wellbeing

If one benefit alone could lead to healthier employees, lower turnover rates, and reduce absenteeism all while raising employee satisfaction and elevating your brand as an employer, it would be a no-brainer, right?

Implementing an unbiased digital + human financial wellbeing benefit has these proven results - especially in the retail space where many workers are living paycheck to paycheck, lacking emergency savings, and have nowhere to go for guidance. Top retail companies are partnering with cutting-edge holistic financial wellbeing programs to offer affordable guidance at scale. 

Financial wellbeing programs like LearnLux can help employees:

• Build emergency savings
• Improve their credit score
• Pay down debt
• Save for big goals like starting a family or buying their first home
• Create a financial plan that will serve their needs for years to come
• Speak to an unbiased Certified Financial Planner™️ that won't sell them products

Programs that blend interactive digital tools with access to unbiased Certified Financial Planner™️ professionals are the gold standard. Rolling out these benefits is also a breeze - modern programs are fast to set up and drive employee engagement right out of the gate. This allows benefits managers to easily start promoting the benefit to current employees and to prospective hires as a part of their total rewards package.

2. Mental Health

Mental health perks help employees develop new mental skills, provide mental health support & counseling, and deliver personal development programs for everyone ranging from couples, teams, and executives. For essential workers, maintaining their mental health is key. As a result, top retail companies are bringing on powerful mental health benefits to support their workforce both on and off the clock. Take a page from Sephora's benefit playbook - they offer Ginger for employee mental health support.

3. Family Planning

It’s common for retail employees to put off long-term life decisions when they feel uncertain about their future. For employees considering starting or growing their family, there is no time like the present to prepare. Becoming a parent can take months if not years of planning and financial preparation. As a result, top retail employers want to support their teams' journey to parenthood. Consider employers like Home Depot and Target that offer adoption assistance, or explore other impactful fertility and family planning benefits.

4. Backup Dependent Care

Planning and affording care for children or dependents can be one of the biggest challenges your employees face during their workdays (and that’s saying a lot when you work in retail).

Making work-life balance a little bit easier for caregivers is an impactful way to show your support and build your employer brand. Whether you offer access to vetted care centers or programs to help offset the costs for working caregivers, offering a dependent care benefit shows that you understand and appreciate your employees’ ongoing balancing act.

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Beyond the short-term competitive advantage, adding these benefits will help take retail companies like yours into the future of work. Having a healthy, productive workforce will help you thrive through these challenging times, and be known as a great place to work in this year, and beyond.