Fringe Benefits for Nurses: 5 Ideas for Your Team

According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), fringe benefits are forms of work compensation that go beyond an employee’s normal rate of pay. As healthcare facilities look to make their recruitment strategies more competitive, advertising specific fringe benefits for nurses may be a good way to set your organization apart from the rest.

The demand for nurses is projected to continue outweighing the supply in the coming years. So, finding innovative ways to attract top talent is quickly becoming a universal priority across facility types. Nurse benefits and salary, career development opportunities, and strong company culture are the foundational factors that influence nurse recruitment, but today’s staffing challenges demand additional incentives.

To help you optimize your recruitment strategies, we’ll provide you with five helpful ideas for enticing high quality nursing professionals to join your team. With these fringe benefits examples on hand to guide your hiring practices, you’ll be better equipped to innovate processes that can help you achieve a healthy, robust workforce.

1. Scheduling Flexibility

Enhancing your nurse scheduling policy to allow for flexibility correlates strongly with employee satisfaction. Here are two different methods for managing schedules that provide enticing fringe benefits for nurses:

Self Scheduling

Changing schedules every week and shifting between night shift and day shift disrupts the circadian rhythm and increases fatigue. When nurses have limited input into how their shifts are scheduled, they often feel as if the process is unfair or only satisfies certain team members.

Incorporating an online self-scheduling platform can help meet staff needs and accommodate individual requests. Allowing nurses to choose their shift start time and regularity of work days provides them with the equity and autonomy needed to help prevent burnout.

Seasonal Shifting Between Full- and Part-Time Employment

Ensuring safety in the healthcare setting requires work-life balance for staff members. Holding staff members to a strict part-time or full-time title may be a barrier to retaining nurses on your team.

Allowing seasonal flexibility for nurses to shift between working 2 and 3 12-hour shifts a week (or 3 and 5 8-hour shifts a week in applicable settings) can help attract the staff required to provide high-quality care in your facility. Perks for nurses with children may include scheduling opportunities like reduced work hours during the summer to accommodate school holidays and family vacations. During the school year, these same employees are often happy to work full-time hours.

Supporting nurses through career and familial developments is important for building a healthy working environment. Distancing your facility from outdated, rigid methods of scheduling and incorporating newer, staff-centered techniques for offering employment benefits helps to strengthen the appeal of your job offer. Scheduling flexibility is also one of the best types of de minimis fringe benefits for nurses that don’t contribute to their tax burden.

2. Subsidized Child Care

Paying for high-quality child care can be difficult for many working families in the U.S. Families spend over 25% of their total combined income on child care, and professionals often base big career decisions on whether their potential salary can cover the expense.

Healthcare facilities that offer subsidized child care as one of their fringe benefits for nurses experience fewer absences and lower rates of staff turnover. Over 80% of both men and women state that child care benefits would play a major role in deciding whether to stay or leave their current place of employment. Incorporating this incentive into your employee benefits package could be the key to maintaining and growing an incredible team.

There are also financial benefits to offering subsidized child care for your employees. The Employer-Provided Child Care Facilities and Services federal tax credit helps companies claim up to 25% of their child care expenses and 10% of their resources and referral expenses, up to a total of $150,000. Child care assistance is one of the most valuable family-friendly employment benefits on the market; and by retaining staff and saving your organization money, it can be an incredible addition to the benefits that set your company apart.

3. Commuting Incentives

The average commuter spends $8,466 a year commuting, with 236 hours spent getting to and from the workplace. Some companies offer transportation benefits to help cover these costs. The IRS allows companies to provide certain commuting fringe benefits, deducted from paychecks on a pre-tax basis as a cost-saving incentive to both the employee and the company. These include $300 per month to cover the cost of transit passes for buses, trains, and ferries, and an additional $300 per month for parking expenses for each employee.

Additionally, facilities can offer the following taxable fringe benefits for nurses to help employees offset the rising costs of getting to and from work:

• Ride sharing (Uber, Lyft) expenses
• Toll reimbursement
• Use of a company vehicle
• Vehicle maintenance allowance
• Fuel cost reimbursement

By offering commuting perks for nurses, you can help to boost the morale of staff coming in to care for your patients. Expanding the number of staff interested in your posted positions and enticing those who may live further away helps your facility build a large, diverse pool of qualified staff.

4. Clinical Cross-Training

Nurses who are encouraged to explore different areas of practice are adaptable and flexible, and have higher rates of satisfaction in the workplace. Thus, you should also consider offering clinical cross-training as part of your fringe benefits for registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs). This may excite employees looking for a long-term career trajectory within a health system.

Building a versatile team gives staff members flexibility while reducing the need for expensive, outsourced travel nurses to fill gaps in the staffing matrix. For example, a neonatal intensive care unit position could offer cross training and floating options to the pediatric newborn clinic. Embedding inter-departmental mobility as RN benefits may help give nurses the broad expertise and sense of teamwork they desire, while cutting hospital costs.

Creating an adaptable workforce with clinical flexibility is important for facilities, as the healthcare field requires creative and complex solutions to solve daily challenges. Careers offering opportunities for personal and professional development empower nurses to reach their full potential, improve patient outcomes, and decrease facility spending.

5. Periodic Retention Bonuses

Many facilities advertise hefty sign-on bonuses for staff accepting new positions within the health system. While this addresses the nursing shortage from the recruitment side, it doesn’t help to retain the trained nurses that are already employed.

It costs each facility an average of $52,350 every time a nurse leaves the bedside. In an effort to save themselves from a $6-10 million expense annually, health systems could offer periodic retention bonuses or improved registered nurse compensation to existing staff members.

This could manifest in multiple smaller payments every few months, or could be one large deposit once the employee reaches a benchmark year after 5, 10, or 15 years of employment. Focusing on hiring and keeping high-quality professionals — not just bulking up the size of your staff — is a more cost effective method of maintaining safe staffing levels.

Ready to Start Landing Top Talent?

When job seekers Google questions like, Is health insurance a fringe benefit? they’re looking for reasons to value one company’s fringe benefits for nurses over another’s. Make sure that your job postings are attractive enough that candidates don’t need to research your comparative value by using IntelyCare’s expert-backed hiring and nursing management insights.