Which employee benefits packages have the biggest impact on employee retention and attraction in cloud technologies like AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce? Keep reading to find out!
If you’re an AWS, Microsoft, or Salesforce end-user or partner, you’ll be keenly aware of one simple fact: there aren’t enough skilled and certified cloud professionals out there. Job postings have grown by 94% in recent years and, despite recent cuts to vendor workforces, cloud skills are still highly sought-after globally.
That makes attracting and retaining high-quality cloud talent a critical priority for many businesses., Especially with 84% of employees stating that, salary aside, workplace benefits are important when deciding if they will accept a job offer or not.
But with such a limited talent pool, employers have to be creative with their incentives. Simply offering a strong salary is no longer enough to attract candidates, because candidate attraction and employee retention are now heavily influenced by employee benefits packages and perks.
To help you understand what to include in your employee benefits program, we collated research from our sister organizations’ Careers and Hiring Guides across three major cloud ecosystems – AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce – to bring you the 5 employee benefits that can immediately impact employee retention and candidate attraction.
The research in this blog is collated from the Mason Frank Careers and Hiring Guide (Salesforce), Nigel Frank Careers and Hiring Guide (Microsoft), and Jefferson Frank Careers and Hiring Guide (AWS).
Employee benefit #1: Remote work
Salesforce
#1
Microsoft
#1
AWS
#3
In a post-pandemic world, it’s rare to see an organization with 100% of its workforce working from an office. While some employers may need employees to be office-based (for security reasons, for example) expecting employees to commute when they don’t need to can impact their decision to join or leave the organization.
Offering remote work empowers employees to create a better work-life balance, reduces commuting, and can also reduce your business overheads (as you don’t need a larger office).
Moreover, offering remote working opportunities can massively expand your available talent pool. Which, in a market with finite talent resources, can be incredibly useful. If you are based in the US, for example, making a new job opening remote will allow you to expand your search and improve your chances of securing the talent you need.
Pro tip
If some (or all) of your employees work remotely and you still offer workplace perks such as free parking or onsite gym, you might want to consider alternatives. Perks like these will only appeal to staff that visit the office frequently, but your employee benefits package should be useful for all employees.
Employee benefit #2: Additional time off
Salesforce
#2
Microsoft
#2
AWS
#1
Rated as the second most important workplace benefit across both Microsoft and Salesforce (and the first for AWS!), the amount of paid time off (PTO) you provide is an important factor in whether a candidate accepts a role, or an employee starts job-seeking.
Put simply, by providing additional time off, you are signaling to candidates and employees that your workplace values a good work-life balance and will empower them to achieve it. And, unsurprisingly, work-life balance is one of the highest priorities for cloud professionals working in AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
A recurring theme that you’ll see throughout this blog post is that, in today’s candidate markets, professionals want a good degree of freedom in how, where, and when they work – almost as much as they want a great salary.
And when cloud professionals can already command high salaries, providing a high degree of flexibility can be an affordable way to secure great talent. Some organizations such as Netflix, LinkedIn, and Roku, have even embraced the concept of “limitless leave”, where employees work hard to complete the tasks they have been given and in return, they’re able to take as much annual leave as they like.
Employee benefit #3: Bonuses
Salesforce
#3
Microsoft
#3
AWS
#2
While salaries and monetary incentive will always be a valuable tool for attracting top talent, the fact that bonuses are third on the list for Microsoft and Salesforce—and second for AWS—shows just how highly employees and candidates value perks such as remote working and additional paid leave.
That being said, a good bonus structure is still one of the most valuable benefits you can offer. Plus, for organizations that can’t offer the top-end salaries some competitors can, it can also be a cost-effective way to top up a salary offering.
Though many organizations know and employ this already, few think to leverage target-driven bonuses as well as they could. A target-driven bonus allows your organization to offer a better salary all-round, but only if certain milestones are hit—this gives your company a kind of insurance policy, as you’ll be providing bonuses to employees that have made a discernable impact on the business.
Of course, bonuses vary hugely within AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce—and can also depend on the type of organization you are. While end-users tend to offer annual (or end-of-the-year) bonuses, partners or ISVs may offer monthly bonuses related to billable hours. As such, offering an annual bonus to a candidate who comes from an ISV may not be appealing.
Employee benefit #4: Health and medical package
Salesforce
#4
Microsoft
#4
AWS
#5
Though not top of the list, a generous health and medical package can be extremely effective in attracting and retaining great talent. Especially in the US, where healthcare costs have increased in recent years.
One of the best ways to create an attractive healthcare offering is to personalize it. The best medical benefits packages are those that vary, based on the needs and context of the employee. Employees who are married or have children, for example, might be more interested in additional coverage for their families.
Whereas in the UK, healthcare may not be quite as valued, as the NHS is free at the point of delivery. As such, packages that include dental and optical can be more valuable to UK-based professionals, as these services are not covered by the NHS.
Furthermore, programs that promote wellness and well-being—such as smoking cessation, exercise, or stress management—can have a two-fold effect. Not only are they attractive to candidates and employees alike, but they can also result in happier and more productive employees, making this a win-win for both talent and employer.
Employee benefit #5: Training and development opportunities
Training and development opportunities have consistently ranked highly as a top attractor for new candidates and a fantastic way to retain existing employees. And with the rise of reskilling and upskilling through vendor-approved reskilling programs like ours, this has become a popular solution for employers and employees alike.
In technologies such as AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce reskilling and upskilling can also be a great way to close skills gaps by retraining existing professionals to fill capacity gaps in your organization.
Plus, if your business has adopted a multi-cloud approach, this can help you diversify your employees’ skillsets and ensure they are equipped to wield tools from a range of different vendors. And, of course, by investing in your existing employees, you can significantly improve your retention rates and avoid the loss of valuable business knowledge.
How to create (or improve) your employee benefits package
With any initiative that you put in place, a “one-size-fits-all” approach will rarely work. And with employee benefits, it’s the same—different people have different needs, so your offering needs to reflect that.
Take, for example, the pandemic. Before 2020, many organizations were convinced that lifestyle benefits, such as free gym memberships or coffee cards, constituted a great benefits package. But the pandemic quickly made these offerings obsolete, in favor of benefits like hybrid working, increased support for working parents, and additional paid-leave.
While the findings above can be helpful in the first stages of re-assessing or creating your employee benefits program, the best way to gauge what your benefits packages should include is to ask your employees.
One way to do this is to create meaningful touchpoints between a sample of your employees and your HR leaders. Run one-to-ones, workshops, and group calls to get a better understanding of what your employees value in a benefits package. Then combine this with solid research from competitors, vendors, and other relevant parties in your sector.
From there, you can begin to iterate and create something that employees and potential candidates will truly value.
