Debra Corey’s top tips on creating a bond with your people

4 min read

We recently hosted a webinar with the brilliant Debra Corey, award-winning HR leader, world-class speaker and four-time book author, to discuss how employers can tackle the Great Resignation by building a bond with their employees through employee benefits and impartial financial education.

Her action-oriented approach took us through 6 top tips to help you create and maintain that bond with your people. We’re going to share an insight into three of these tips so that you can start implementing them into your strategy today.

#1 Lead with strategy and align with your values and culture

The only way to have a bond in any relationship is to have shared beliefs that unite you to one another. And for this reason, if you genuinely want to create and maintain a bond with your people, you need to be led by your beliefs - your company values. These are what tell your people who you are and what you stand for, coming together to drive behaviours, actions and to create your own unique company culture.

And when it comes to employee benefits, your values need to have a starring role to help you set your strategy and select the benefits that are right for your company and your people. This is more important than ever as people put culture and values high on their list of why they decide to join and stay with a company, so if they don’t find them being lived, they’ll quickly decide to leave and find a company where they do this.

Here are two things to consider as you do this:

1. Start by developing a benefits strategy to guide and direct your decisions and actions, having it align with your values and culture.
2. Once you have your strategy, use it as a lens to look through as you make decisions as to add, change or delete your various benefit programs.

#2 Weave in care, compassion and empathy

Over the past few years, companies have done an amazing job showing care, compassion and empathy to their people, helping them both professionally and personally deal with the challenges that life was throwing at them. And because of this, our people have grown to expect this from us, asking us to use care, compassion and empathy in how we treat them, and when it comes to employee benefits, how we weave them into how we select and design our company benefit programs.

Here are three things to consider as you evaluate/re-evaluate your employee benefit programs, weaving in the mighty trio of care, compassion and empathy:

1. Have benefits that are meaningful and relevant - giving your employees what they really need.
2. Have benefits that are ‘just in time’ - giving your employees benefits they can use now, in time to help and support them.
3. Have benefits that flex as your employee’s needs change - giving your employees ones that can change and adapt if/when their needs change.

Financial education is a great example of a benefit that ticks all three of these boxes - giving employees something they need that will make a genuine difference in their lives, is something they can use time and time again ‘in the moment’, and is flexible enough to meet their changing needs.   

#3  Make sure your benefits meet the needs of your diverse workforce

 When I started out working in benefits many years ago, we had one limited set of benefits that fit a generic set of needs. But as the workplace has changed, it’s become more important to design our benefits offering around the diverse needs of our people, understanding their own unique requirements. In fact, according to a study by Reward Gateway, 51 percent of employees said they want employee benefits that align with their needs.

This can be done in two ways:

1. Putting in place a diverse set of benefits to meet the diverse needs of your people.
2. Putting in place a benefit that is robust and flexible enough to meet the diverse needs of your people.

Financial education is an example of the latter, for although finances are something that the majority of our people worry about as shown in the research below, the way we manage and deal with varies from person to person. And for this reason, it can meet the current and evolving needs of your workforce.

If you’d like to hear all six of Debra's top tips for building a bond with your people stronger than money, you can watch the webinar on demand.