‘Caring’ as an employee benefit: Your employees will thank you for it

This past January, the U.S. labor market unemployment rate hit a 53-year low at 3.4%. Despite inflation and banking issues, the labor market remains very tight and competitive. Employers looking to hire new employees or retain the ones they have will have to consider how they are caring for them.

MetLife’s latest U.S. Employee Benefit Trend Study – The Advantages of Employee Care: Creating human-centric employee experiences and work environments – shows that being cared for at work is a key element of employee health and happiness, and productivity. However, 42% of today’s employees don’t feel cared for by their employees.

One very important element to show you care as an employer, is to embrace Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) issues and embed them into your policies. The report says that DEI can be seen as a manifestation of employee care and should be communicated with tangible actions.

Additional MetLife research has revealed that employees are generally ahead of employers in thinking about DEI; specifically, they place greater emphasis on equity (e.g., leadership teams that reflect the make-up of the workforce) and inclusion (e.g., welcoming and supportive work environments) than employers, which typically prioritize hiring practices to achieve diversity. Organizations should be aware of such perception gaps in designing and communicating DEI strategies.

“Our research shows care is not only a differentiated driver of the employee experience – but also a proven workplace metric to measure employer outcomes,” says Todd Katz, executive vice president of Group Benefits at MetLife. “As the economy and labor market remain volatile, and workplace trends fluctuate, employers can’t afford to overlook employee care. When organizations genuinely demonstrate employee care, they are much more likely to weather macro challenges effectively, and rise to the top for current employees and job seekers alike.”

Workers care more about purposeful work today than they did in the past. In 2023, only 30% of those without purposeful work said they intended to be with their organization in 12 months; in 2022 that figure was 36% and in 2021 it was 53%. More employees are looking for more meaning in their work, which helps explain why purpose is an important driver of perceptions of employee care.

Within the context of employee care, purposeful work is the top driver of employee mental, social and physical health. Generation Z is particularly interested in their employers having a clear purpose and a positive impact on the community; 50% of Gen Z workers cite it as a “must-have” benefit when considering a new role, compared to only 43% of all employees.

Forty percent of boomers in the survey said community impact is a “must-have,” compared to 31% last year. Meaningful work also has a significant impact on retention, especially among Hispanic employees, Gen Z and remote workers.

Nearly 6 in 10 workers (58%) consider purposeful work a “must-have” when considering whether to stay in their current role or accept a new job. That figure is even higher for boomers (63%), Black workers (62%) and women (61%).

A full 70% of this year’s survey respondents say that a supportive manager is a “must-have” for employers to demonstrate care. The good news is that 75% of workers say their manager is supportive, up 2% points from last year.

Read more: 4 reasons why companies must reimagine employee care

Employers can take action by clarifying and elevating enterprise purpose, reinforcing purpose via relevant and employee communications, embed purpose into systems, monitor and measure the impact, define cultural norms and behaviors, make culture part of a manger’s job and dedicate resources and attention to culture.