By Miriam Martín, Director of Communication and Marketing at Sodexo Benefits and Incentives.
There is no doubt that we are going through a moment of uncertainty in the economic sphere and that companies and workers have been forced to optimize their costs. All of this also affects the labor market itself, which is experiencing moments of high mobility of workers seeking to improve their purchasing power to cope with price increases. This reality is not alien to companies, nor to SMEs. In this sense, flexible pay can become an important ally for maximize the net wage of workerswhile acting as a lever for attracting and retaining talent, increasing their productivity and commitment.
With this type of remuneration modality, in the first place, there is a purely economic benefit for the employee, since it allows 30% of the gross salary to be allocated to services exempt from Personal Income Tax, with which the worker can have a higher net salary to meet his expenses. On the other hand, this type of remuneration is aimed at alleviating food expenses during the working day, childcare for children under 3 years of age or transport to the workplace, which are habitual and widespread consumption, which is why they are particularly relevant. It is the company that decides what services to offer, and the employees, what services and how much of their salary they want to allocate to each of them.
Sometimes there is a tendency to think that a small company or certain sectors cannot address employee welfare plans or implement flexible remuneration policies due to a lack of resources or because they have different employee profiles. Perhaps for this reason, only 2 out of 10 companies with less than 50 employees have a flexible remuneration modality, as reflected in our study of Trends in HR 2023 that will be published soon. However, far from that belief, the models of flexible remuneration can be perfectly adapted to all sizes and sectors of the company -also to SMEs- and with hardly any administrative burden.
It is important to point out that when it comes to offering an attractive and more complete remuneration package, The most attractive option for the employee is to combine monetary compensation with benefits in the form of social benefit (being the company who assumes the cost of these). However, this margin does not always exist in companies from a salary cost point of view. For this type of case, flexible remuneration is a very interesting option, since the company does not incur additional salary costs, since it does not assume the payment of these benefits. In addition, it is a very in accordance with the current economic context in which cost control is more important than everbut that allows making benefit policies accessible to all types of companies.
For reasons like this, 60% of the companies that currently offer flexible remuneration plan to work in this line to improve or expand it in 2023, as stated in our previously cited study. A fact that shows the satisfaction of those companies that have tried this modality.
In short, this flexible and customizable tool has great potential as a lever for attracting and retaining talent and adds attractiveness to the value proposition of companies for employees in a context of high competition. In addition, it is highly compatible with the current context of cost containment, for all this, it has become an important ally for companies of all sizes. At Sodexo we are specialists in managing these plans for all types of companies. If you need more information, do not hesitate to contact us.
