An employee benefit gaining popularity

Home » An employee benefit gaining popularity Published: 30th January 2023 This Article was Written by: Adrian Anderson   employee benefit , mortgage advice

Despite employers’ efforts to increase salaries, recent statistics show wages are still struggling to keep up with inflation. Some organisations are subsequently revisiting their benefit packages to give employees greater support.

While many employers want to support their staff with the cost-of-living crisis, it can be hard to find additional finances for salaries, particularly when costs are rising across many areas of the operations. Some organisations have responded by giving their staff one-off cost of living bonuses; others are rethinking their benefit packages to find other ways to help.

The pressure to retain staff

In many sectors there is still intense pressure to retain staff, such is the competitiveness of the market and volume of unfilled vacancies. Even though the unemployment rate has risen very slightly in recent months, many businesses are reporting how tough it is to fill the vacancies they have. At the end of December, there were 1,161,000 vacancies unfilled in the UK.

For those rethinking their benefit packages, many are considering the wellbeing of their staff in the challenging economy. One area where we have been helping is to support the financial resilience and welfare of employees.

Over recent years, we have been running workshops and one-to-one financial surgeries for a number of organisations’ staff. These give employees advice around mortgages, mortgage protection, and the current property market’s implications for them and their family.

Fostering security and lessening worries

This service helps the organisation’s staff in a number of ways. For some, it helps them get onto the property ladder sooner than hoped and gives them greater security. For others, it helps them review their current mortgage provision to gain a more competitively priced solution. This in turn helps their personal finances and lessens money worries.

The service also helps those looking to upsize, downsize or move to a preferred location to reduce commuting time. The security that comes from being happy with your home greatly supports employee mental and physical wellbeing. After the past 2 years companies certainly appreciate the importance of employees being comfortable with their home and work-life balance.

A growing demand

In more recent times, we’ve seen a big interest from employers looking to add financial advice to their staff benefit package. We’ve supported businesses from a wide variety of industry sectors including advertising agencies, risk management companies and recruitment consultants, to name but a few.

One of the reasons companies are keen to include us in their benefits package is our independence. We provide advice across the whole of the mortgage market and are not tied to a panel of lenders.

One-to-one advice sessions with individual employees can be done at the organisation’s premises or via zoom. Our service is always tailored to what the company requires or prefers.

How companies are benefitting

Here is an example of how a company has benefited from widening their employee benefits package to cover mortgage advice.

Will Brookes, Managing Director of Raconteur said, “Anderson Harris attended our offices and staff were invited to book mortgage consultations free of charge, in order to understand their circumstances and help them with anything from understanding the mortgage process to accessing calculations on affordability.

Uptake on these meetings was high, with around 35% taking a meeting. Unequivocally, feedback about the meetings was entirely and extremely positive. Many staff reported that they found the service very helpful, and that they had more options to buy, re-mortgage or save themselves money than they had previously thought.”

Will added, “Mortgage brokers don’t always have the best reputation, I think it’s fair to say, but the Anderson Harris approach is consultative, informative, trustworthy and friendly, so they are a stand-out broker in my opinion. The team did not look to push anyone down any sort of route, and offered a high level of detail and care to everyone, regardless of individual circumstances / affordability.”

Brand consulting firm, Landor & Fitch, also found providing mortgage advice to employees proved popular among its team. Charlotte Bailey-Wood, Senior People Manager of the firm, said, “We recently introduced mortgage advice sessions at Landor & Fitch to bolster our benefits and resources available to employees. These sessions have been extremely positively received.”

Charlotte added, “The feedback is that the sessions are really informative and make mortgages easier to understand – particularly for those beginning to look at purchasing properties for the first time. We can’t wait to run more of these throughout the year.”

Can we help?

Please get in touch if this is a benefit you would like to offer your staff, or something that you would like to see your company offering in future. We would be happy to provide information specific to your organisation and its plans.

Contact our team of specialists on tel. 020 7495 6633 or email enquiries@andersonharris.co.uk.