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By Claire Gibson, Employee Benefits Consultant
In recent years we have seen many changes that widen the support around important employee lifecycle events, from shared parental leave to additional support around miscarriages. Right now, there is a ground swell for change around both fertility and menopause.
With the current candidate-led job market, it could be a smart and proactive move for your business to implement these types of support and benefits now, ahead of the curve.
Fertility support and benefits
It is baffling that we can have so many changes and support for anyone who actually becomes pregnant, but so little for those trying to make this their reality. If you want to be ahead of the trend, and have best practice solutions in place for supporting your people, fertility support and benefits should form part of your 2023 review.
According to leading UK reproductive health benefits provider, Fertifa, 88% of employees who feel unsupported during IVF treatment either leave, or consider leaving, their job, and 90% of employees who face fertility challenges will leave their job for a company that offers fertility benefits. Those are some remarkable figures, and highlight just how powerful your retention ROI could be from implementing reproductive benefits solutions for your people.
There are a wide range of options available to your business, to offer differing levels of fertility support:
At a basic level, these benefit solutions offer reproductive health education modules for your people, and management and leadership training, healthcare assessments and screening, discounted fertility treatment options, and access to dedicated fertility advisers.
As an enhancement to your offering, you can also choose to add employer-funded fertility treatment, whereby you set an allowance per employee to use against their reproductive health requirements. Some providers will even manage this process for you!
Menopause support and benefits
Reviewing your approach to menopause support is an investment in future generations of women in the workplace, plus, organisations who have more women at the top perform better financially. If organisations increase retention among female staff, not only can they increase the knowledge base and bottom line, but they can increase diversity at senior levels too.
To put the size of this issue into focus, it’s important to remember that 1 in 3 women in the workplace are of menopausal age. This equates to roughly 4.4 million women aged 50-64 in the UK workforce (ONS,2019), and the fastest-growing demographic.
When you consider that 8 out of 10 peri-menopausal women are also working in some capacity or other (UK Gov,2022), the number of women affected begins to scale up dramatically. In the current recruitment climate, providing this kind of support could make a vital difference to your business’s ability to attract and keep these highly capable and experienced people.
Again, there are options for varied levels of support solutions here, ranging from a fixed-fee-per-employee, pay-as-you-go product, and inclusions in standard medical insurance products, to a full suite of menopause health education modules and training, screening services, and employer-funded treatment and consultations.
By providing access to a specialist menopause-trained GP, these solutions mean that a menopause diagnosis could be made and acted upon potentially years faster than an NHS diagnosis, opening up quicker access to treatment, and limiting the impact on mental health and difficulties in maintaining workplace performance.
Johnson Fleming can help you to get ahead of the curve, and build an impressive suite of innovative employee benefits that both supports your people and gives you the edge in the battle for talent.
To find out more about how to enhance your benefits strategy for the coming year, download Johnson Fleming’s new guide, ‘Innovative ways to elevate your employee benefits and HR strategies for 2023’.
