Should the size of your team impact the benefits you offer?

Team size can affect the employee benefits you offer in various ways. For example, new start-ups with small teams will likely focus on quick growth and may not have the resources to invest in extensive perks. As you recruit more team members, your financial resources will likely increase. However, the challenges of managing larger teams will require a different approach to your employee benefit package.

There may also be a tipping point where you must split your team members into several small teams rather than one larger one.

The incentives you offer will impact team performance and overall productivity, so it's worth assessing how changes in team size and productivity impact income and interpersonal factors. Here are two ways team size can impact performance.

Team dynamics

Team size can affect structure, which also impacts team performance. Team size affects communication, with small teams being more able to discuss challenges and devise creative solutions, while larger teams may need a more defined approval process.

Communication also impacts team dynamics. In small teams, it's generally easier to build close relationships where team members feel supported and invested in each other's success. If you're considering whether to split larger teams to create small teams, you might want to consider the "two pizza rule", which suggests that teams should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas. It's an appealing visual image, suggesting that teams small enough to gather around a table over two pizzas will communicate well and have good relationships.

Employee experience

Team size also affects each employee's work experience. When your team members are happy at work, they're more likely to be highly engaged, leading to increased team productivity, reduced sickness absence and greater employee retention. Small teams typically offer a more supportive environment with better communication and awareness of each individual's needs. This effect is reduced in larger teams. In larger businesses with several small teams, there may be excellent relationships and team performance within each team. However, employees may feel disconnected from colleagues in other departments.

Employees increasingly seek work that aligns with their values and want to feel part of something bigger than themselves. A team structure that lets them feel connected with team members in other departments can enhance their sense of job satisfaction. Regardless of team size, team leaders must foster good relationships with their colleagues.

Your approach to your employee benefit package will vary depending on several factors. Every workforce is different, and team members' needs differ according to their lifestyles, circumstances, and preferences. Younger team members will likely seek support for well-being and a good work-life balance. Employees with families may need help with childcare costs and want greater financial security, while older workers will be considering retirement planning and what lifestyle their pension fund will ultimately provide.

Next, we'll explain some easy steps to help you design an effective benefit package for your team members. We'll also consider ways to tailor your benefits according to team size.

Some employee benefits are mandatory

By law, you must provide your employees with the following:

• Annual leave of at least 5.6 weeks per year.
• Statutory Sick Pay of £116.75 per week for any sickness absence of up to 28 weeks.
• A workplace pension with automatic enrolment for eligible staff.
• Parental leave and pay can be maternity, paternity or shared parental leave.
• Bereavement leave if a dependent dies or parental bereavement leave following the death of a child.

Each of these is a minimum statutory requirement for eligible employees. It's a good idea to offer enhanced provisions where possible. For example, investing in income protection insurance can help you enhance the sick pay available to employees during a sickness absence. You can also increase your team members' annual leave allowance and offer pension contribution matching or additional maternity pay. Seek advice from your accountant or financial advisor to consider your options.

Talk to your team members

Before offering a new employee benefit, it's wise to consider what your team members want. Their needs will likely vary depending on their personal lives, financial circumstances, and even how they travel to work. Speaking with team members can help you make informed decisions about where to invest your budget and can also help you identify low-cost or free perks your employees will value.

Team size can influence how you gather information. In small teams, team leaders can often speak with their employees one-on-one and ask for their views in person or via email. In larger teams, you may need a structured approach to gather responses from more people, perhaps via an online survey.

Create building blocks for business growth

If you're a new business with a small team, you must plan carefully to make the best use of what may be limited funds. However, it's worth considering what will help you attract the best talent as your business grows. It's also wise to plan for the future and choose benefits that will grow with your business. For example, if you invest in group health insurance, you can add new coverage and additional services at renewal to reflect larger teams' needs. Most providers have different offerings depending on employee numbers. It's worth speaking to a broker for advice on future-proofing your coverage and choosing a provider that meets your needs now and in the years to come.

Benefit packages for smaller teams

As we've mentioned, small teams are often more flexible and have excellent communication skills. However, unless you've deliberately kept teams small as part of a larger business, fewer people may mean less income and money to spend on perks. On the plus side, small teams typically involve less bureaucracy, meaning you can be more agile in your decision-making.

Making informed decisions is vital, but these can be more straightforward as you can speak with team members about the perks they'll value. At the same time, you can cover the basics to allow for expansion in the future. Here are some ways to tailor your approach to enhance the advantages of small teams.

Flexible benefits

Flexibility lets you offer a personalised approach so that employees can choose what to include. For example, you could include the Workplace Nursery Benefit, which will benefit team members with very young children. A health cash plan pays cashback on medical expenses and lets team members choose which health professional they see for treatment.

Flexible working lets workers structure their working hours to suit their circumstances or choose to work from home some of the time. This needs careful balance in small teams as working patterns can impact the team's work, particularly on a shared project. The upside is that small teams make those discussions more straightforward.

Team building activities

Small teams are often close-knit, meaning individual contributions have a significant impact. It's easy to take this idea for granted. However, small teams can struggle with personality clashes or the effects of workplace stress.

Arranging team-building activities can strengthen relationships and improve team performance by helping employees acknowledge each other's skills. They can also remind employees that their colleagues are individuals with lives outside work. Team-building activities can include away days, shared lunches, or activities. Remote work can lead to feelings of isolation, so these activities are particularly valuable for employees working from home.

Free or low-cost benefits

Meaningful perks don't have to carry a high price tag. You can support your team by providing free resources to help them improve their health and mental well-being or enjoy their free time. The NHS' Live Well platform offers health improvement advice and self-help resources. Many health insurers and charities provide free articles online, with information on mental well-being and ways to live a healthy lifestyle. You can share links via email or on your company intranet or place leaflets in a shared space.

You could also provide information on things to do in your local area, such as popular attractions, events or walks. Having a nominated person to research reliable resources and collate information is a good idea. However, if this isn't practical, you can also ask team members to submit details of information that's helped them or activities they've enjoyed. This approach shows your team you're interested in their lives outside work.

Health insurance

Health insurance is a highly valued employee benefit, and each insurer's coverage typically varies according to team size. It's worth considering even as a new start-up as it can help prevent employee burnout and help employees return to work more quickly after a sickness absence or avoid it altogether. Small teams can struggle to cover an absent member's workload, so providing health coverage can help minimise any issues.

If you have a limited budget, you can choose core coverage, which usually includes in-patient treatment, cancer care and direct access to counselling and physiotherapy. Your employees can also access telephone health helplines, virtual GP service and membership rewards, including discounts on various products and services. As your business grows, you can add more coverage as needed. Health insurers can also provide data and information to help you plan wellness programs and support your employees' health.

Larger businesses

Your team structure will likely change as your business grows and employee numbers rise. Your teams may have expanded to the point that you need to create more small teams to maintain effective team performance. Equally, larger teams can offer greater scope for knowledge sharing and creative ideas. However, you'll still face challenges associated with managing more people. Team communication can become more complex, making gathering information about individual needs and preferences more challenging. There's often a strong sense of community within small teams but little communication between teams within the company as a whole.

One advantage of a larger business is that you'll likely have a bigger budget. Here are some approaches to consider.

Additional health insurance benefits

As mentioned, health insurance policies include core coverage and optional extras to add for an additional cost, meaning you can tailor your policy to suit your needs and budget. You can enhance your policy to provide treatment for common health risks in your industry. Most health insurers offer employee health assessments. While individual results are confidential, they provide data to help you identify health trends. This can guide your coverage decisions and promote other policy perks, such as discounted gym memberships if employees are generally inactive.

You can also enhance your mental health coverage to include in-patient care or access to more counselling sessions.

Finally, most insurers offer optical and dental coverage. Adding this to your policy can be a cost-effective way to fund mandatory eye tests for workers using display screens and help your employees save money on private dental care.

Structured benefits

In small teams, it can be easy to listen to employee preferences and let employees tailor each benefit to suit their preferences. While you should still consider flexible working requests on a case-by-case basis, taking a more structured approach elsewhere can be helpful.

This framework typically works best using a points system or financial allowance. You can still include core provisions for every team member, such as annual leave, a workplace pension and core health insurance coverage. Then, employees can use their allowance to buy more annual leave, enhance their health insurance coverage or add childcare support as needed. You could also provide a specific allowance for personal growth that they can spend as they wish on professional development or their other interests.

Employee Assistance Program

An Employee Assistance Program (EAP) provides your team counselling and other support. Several mental health practitioners offer standalone schemes, or you can add an EAP to your group health insurance policy. Schemes usually include a specified number of counselling sessions. Some let employees self-fund additional treatment sessions if needed. However, this typically only applies to standalone services.

An EAP can also include access to telephone helplines offering legal and financial guidance, including signposting callers to third-party sources of advice and support.

Insurers typically offer EAPs as optional extras on their group health insurance policies. They're typically available regardless of team size. However, the available services vary in many cases depending on the number of employees.

CSR projects

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can form part of your environmental, social and governance strategy by helping your company contribute to your local community. CSR can also foster a strong sense of community within and between each team by giving them a shared goal.

One example might be to work with a local charity or community organisation to support a specific project by providing practical help. This could be creating a community garden or painting a room at a care home to improve the environment. Some employers provide paid time off for employees to donate blood or shake a donation tin to collect money for local charities.

Alternatively, set a fundraising goal and encourage each team to arrange fundraising challenges and invite their colleagues to participate. The planning stage encourages better communication and team-building and lets colleagues socialise when they take part.

Career development support

Larger teams can offer increased opportunities for employees to share knowledge and develop a shared understanding of each team's work. Creating learning and development sessions encourages employees to share their expertise. This could form part of your training program for new recruits or employees aspiring to leadership roles.

Some professional development may require external training. We've mentioned allocating each employee a training and development allowance. However, you could also consider funding further or higher education or professional certification if it enhances an employee's skills.

Large corporations

If you have a larger business with 500+ employees, many of the principles we've already mentioned will still be relevant. You may have several small teams, meaning communication within the team is straightforward, but there may be less connection between teams. However, you may also have larger teams and need to consider how to create a positive team dynamic.

CSR can bring different departments together and let workers get to know colleagues at different business levels. You may also have the resources to support a local project by organising fundraising events.

While you'll likely need to take a more structured approach to perks, it's wise to include some flexibility to cater to employees' needs.

Here are a few ways to tailor your employee perks to a larger workforce.

Comprehensive healthcare

Health insurance companies tailor their policies to suit businesses of different sizes. Corporate policies are typically available to businesses with 250+ employees. However, some benefits are only available to customers with more than 500 workers. At this level, you'll likely have the resources to invest in comprehensive coverage, meaning your employees can benefit from unlimited treatment. You could also consider extending coverage to employees' families.

Corporate policies also include services to support you in managing larger teams. We've mentioned that insurers can provide anonymised data from employee health assessments to help you plan wellness initiatives. With a corporate policy, you'll often get more support. Additional services range from occupational health advice and mental well-being programs to crisis and change management support, so you can outsource some functions as needed.

In-house career development and training

As mentioned, employees who clearly understand their future progression within your company are more likely to stay with you, meaning you spend less time recruiting and dealing with staff turnover. You can use the strategies we've already discussed, such as mentorship, work shadowing and funding for external training. However, consider implementing a structured staff development program to help your employees reach their full potential. Managers often assume that people who are good at their jobs will also make great leaders. However, specific training is usually needed to develop leadership skills effectively.

Larger teams are also less likely to be negatively impacted if one team member takes a planned leave of absence. Letting staff take a sabbatical to pursue personal growth or education could help them avoid burnout and give you a more engaged employee when they return.

Employee interest groups

Employee interest groups can help workers with similar interests get together, regardless of their team or department, and build good workplace relationships. They can also serve a strategic purpose. Say your company wants to increase diversity, inclusion and equity across the business. An employee interest group involving LGBTQ+ or BAME staff can offer peer support to those workers. However, if they're happy to share their discussions, it can help you develop strategies to support them in the workplace and attract new staff from those communities.

It's often best to enable employees to start a group based on their interests. For example, you could provide a central point for physical or virtual sign-up sheets or posters advertising group meetings and a booking system for a dedicated meeting room.

International insurance coverage

If your company is global, the support your employees need will vary depending on whether they're residents of another country, carry out project work abroad, or make frequent business trips.

Travel insurance covers shorter trips and includes coverage for lost luggage, cancelled flights and emergency medical treatment abroad. However, if a UK-based employee spends several months overseas, they'll likely need routine healthcare that travel insurance doesn't cover. In that case, providing international health insurance ensures your team can access healthcare quickly and easily.

We hope this guide has helped you consider how to tailor employee benefits to your team. Globacare's specialist brokers help clients find the right insurance to support a high-quality employee benefits package. Our ongoing support ensures your business has the right coverage in place as you grow. Contact us for tailored advice.