When working from home, employees can often feel alienated, which can lead to high turnover rates. Providing helpful, enriching, and creative benefits can attract top talent and motivate your remote workers. Even better, when employees are satisfied with their jobs, their performance increases. Here are four exciting perks to consider offering your remote employees to enrich their lives and work experiences.

Financial Counseling 

When employees are experiencing financial stress, it can affect their work, focus, and attendance. Student loans, credit card debt, and family expenses may be silent struggles that are impacting your employees’ performance. When one is distressed about money, it is hard for them to focus on work and interact positively with coworkers. However, since money is still considered a taboo topic in the workplace, it is difficult for those with financial struggles to express their anxiety and get help.

Luckily, there are numerous platforms for online financial counseling that you can offer remote workers to conveniently provide assistance. Those platforms will most probably do wonders in terms of helping your employees in choosing the right college bank accounts, making the right investment decisions and more. Remote financial counseling allows your employees to receive a financial education conveniently and in the privacy of their homes. This has the additional advantage of allowing employees to have access to paperwork and financial documents stored in their home, so the financial counselor can easily review the state of their finances and work on ways to improve their relationship with money.

Providing all employees with the opportunity to learn what it takes to save for retirement, how to get preapproved for a mortgage, pay off credit card debt, or achieve other financial goals helps them to take focus off their financial stress and invest that energy back into the workplace. After you have sent the accounting services proposal, a financial counselor will map out an actionable, reasonable plan to improve their financial conditions.. Adding this into your repertoire of benefits is an attractive and exciting bonus that will show your remote employees that you care about their overall wellness and want to give them the tools to master their financial lives.

Gym Membership

Promoting a culture of health and wellness in the workplace is essential, whether your employees are in-office or remote. There are many benefits to exercise that can pay off in increased performance at work, such as improved sleep, stress reduction, greater mental focus and clarity, and reduced lifelong health issues. However, finding a gym membership that is useful to remote employees across a wide geographic area can be a struggle. 

A great solution can be signing employees up for virtual fitness classes. This allows all employees to exercise conveniently at home and opens up a wide range of classes and options that may not be available at a brick and mortar fitness center. Online fitness classes can allow employees to use their home gym equipment, or may require no equipment at all. People are far more likely to exercise if their fitness plan is convenient and accessible, and virtual classes provide this convenience to your employees. 

Additionally, you may find that the best option is to allow a fitness stipend to employees so they can select a gym that is local and suits their needs. However you decide to offer this benefit, there are many rewards to promoting the health of your workers, especially remote ones. Remote employees tend to be more sedentary since they don’t have to expend the energy to commute to work or walk around the office. Making sure your remote workers are empowered to focus on fitness ensures they can enjoy active lifestyles.

Therapy Sessions

Mental health is often a neglected aspect of one’s overall wellness. While steps have been taken in the field of destigmatizing mental health, many people may still not consider therapy an option for them. However, when provided by an employer, workers are far more likely to take advantage of therapy sessions. As therapy can be an expensive undertaking for an individual, even one with health insurance, subsidizing this cost gives your employees the opportunity to take advantage of a powerful resource.

Talk therapy can benefit workers’ lives in key areas related to work performance. Some positive effects of therapy include improved communication skills, increased optimism, reduced stress, and better decision-making. Therapy also helps one feel more confident, a key skill in the workplace. A therapist can help identify areas of personal improvement and create a plan to help their client put into practice the skills they learn from their sessions.

For these reasons, providing talk therapy as a resource to employees not only benefits their personal lives, but helps them to become more satisfied and productive. For remote employees, there are many online platforms and providers that will conduct virtual therapy sessions. This allows remote employees, no matter where they’re located, to enjoy the benefits of therapy from the comfort of home. Therapy sessions can help your remote employees learn skills that make them more focused and content while on the job, in addition to increased self-esteem.

Vacation Deals

In the United States, workers leave around one third of unused vacation time on the table. The reason paid time off is often neglected is due to such factors as work overload, inadequate coverage, and most importantly, the worry that taking time off will make one appear to not care about their job. This can be an additional source of anxiety for remote employees, who don’t have the same chance to make a face-to-face impression that shows their dedication to the job. 

However, giving your remote employees the chance to get out of their houses and experience new things is a great way to promote a positive work environment. Showing your remote employees that you value their time off and want to encourage them to explore the world and try new things during that time validates the effort they put into the workplace. In fact, remote workers are generally more productive than those who are in the office full-time. 

Whether your company provides vacation stipends, deals on vacation packages, or other vacation perks, it tells your employees that you value their time and life enrichment. Encouraging a company culture where employees feel good about using their vacation time increases their satisfaction and allows them to take advantage of restorative time away from work. 

Caring about the wellbeing and satisfaction of your employees is an excellent practice in any industry, especially if you have a remote workforce. Making sure remote employees know they are valued, appreciated, and healthy is a key way to create a company culture of positivity and workplace satisfaction

Author Bio: This article is written by our marketing team at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is dedicated to providing powerful solutions for your HR teams and creating an exceptional employee experience. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, onboarding, and to save you valuable time!