The Best Benefits: Taking Care of your Staff, Guaranteeing their Well-being and Promoting their Professional Development

Ignacio de Loyola, Head of HR, Pepper Advantage

As a passionate cyclist, I like to think of a company as a bicycle; when you do not pedal, the bicycle does not move. Coordination, teamwork, and consistent effort are the keys, and we must work to achieve attractive working conditions to ensure we attract motivated employees who do their work with enthusiasm, effort and commitment.

The secret to any company is a good career plan coupled with attractive benefits for employees. At Pepper Advantage Spain the growth of our business is an essential objective, but to achieve it we must ensure we take care of the people who make this ambition possible. Only then will we achieve success.

Working with people can be challenging, and in the four years since we started our journey, we have grown a business that started with 36 people, upgraded our offices (new location, new workspace, new tools), and dealt with a major pandemic, along with the rest of the world. Our priority in this instance was to take care of our people, so we were one of the first organisations to move our people home (ensuring their health was a priority). We implemented a range of communication channels so that everyone felt connected, developed blogs to share experiences, organised remote events, promoted physical and mental exercise, and most importantly, left no one alone.

Today in July 2023 we are now a company of more than 150 people and after living through hard personal and professional moments, where people have needed the support of the company (flexibility, health care, personal attention, etc.) the response is still immediate, because a company is not just numbers. It is about the people.

When we think about benefits for our employees, we must look for the advantages or added incentives that we make available to each person. This goes beyond wages, contract rights and labor laws. In today’s world people want more than money and material goods. They need a good atmosphere, continual support, clear career development, a pathway to improve skills and opportunities for a better future.

When we go through a selection process with new candidates, learning and development opportunities are almost always at the top of their list of priorities when choosing where and for whom to work. We know that each person has to demonstrate effort, commitment and results, but we can also ensure they have key benefits and opportunities available to motivate them to give their best each day. It’s a win-win situation.

"A clear value proposition for employees, good work-life balance, competitive remuneration and excellent benefits are the fundamental elements to obtain a perfect fusion between company and worker"

It’s important to implement tools that help our employees commit to their work (through closeness, motivation, understanding, flexibility and adaptation), but we must also communicate clearly and consistently, we must know our people, and our people have to know the company. It’s essential that we must make them participants of our successes, but not forget that they can also be participants of our failures.

A Human Resources department and a company that wants to be a benchmark must place equality at the top of its pillars, a range of competitive benefits that make possible the retention of talent and well-being, and a culture of commitment. For this we offer:

- equal opportunities for professional development (training and internal promotion),

- health and wellbeing benefits (medical insurance, life insurance, physical and mental health workshops),

- competitive salaries (flexible remuneration and tax benefits),

- conciliation measures (teleworking policy),

- corporate social responsibility projects (solidarity initiatives, environmental care, equality)

- and a perfect environment where personal relationships guarantee coexistence and teamwork.

Every day we must work to improve our management, incorporate new ideas that help improve wellbeing (such as workshops, events, solidarity initiatives), discover and retain talent, and take care of our people.

Developing and maintaining meaningful relationships with people in such a digitised world is one of the challenges that we face as an organisation, so we must strive to make people feel that they are supported. There is no greater benefit to an employee than knowing who they can count on and who can help them.

For Pepper Advantage Spain, the choice of benefits we offer our employees is an important part of who we are, but above all else we are a company that positively motivates our people to obtain the best results.

Our values (Can Do, Balanced, and Real) underpin a culture which is focused on people. A clear value proposition for employees, good work-life balance, competitive remuneration and excellent benefits are the fundamental elements to obtain a perfect fusion between company and worker.