“Employee welfare is a comprehensive term including various services, benefits and facilities offered to employees & by the employers. Through such generous fringe benefits the employer makes life worth living for employees.”

Welfare includes anything that is done for the comfort and improvement of employees and is provided over and above the wages. Welfare helps in keeping the morale and motivation of the employees high so as to retain the employees for longer duration. The welfare measures need not be in monetary terms only but in any kind/forms. Employee welfare includes monitoring of working conditions, creation of industrial harmony through infrastructure for health, industrial relations and insurance against disease, accident and unemployment for the workers and their families.

Employee welfare entails all those activities of employer which are directed towards providing the employees with certain facilities and services in addition to wages or salaries.

The very logic behind providing welfare schemes is to create efficient, healthy, loyal and satisfied labor force for the organization. The purpose of providing such facilities is to make their work life better and also to raise their standard of living.

The important benefits of welfare measures can be summarized as follows:

• They provide better physical and mental health to workers and thus promote a healthy work environment
• Facilities like housing schemes, medical benefits, and education and recreation facilities for workers’ families help in raising their standards of living. This makes workers to pay more attention towards work and thus increases their productivity.
• Employers get stable labor force by providing welfare facilities. Workers take active interest in their jobs and work with a feeling of involvement and participation.
• Employee welfare measures increase the productivity of organization and promote healthy industrial relations thereby maintaining industrial peace.
• The social evils prevalent among the labors such as substance abuse, etc are reduced to a greater extent by the welfare policies.

For example at Bajaj Electricals there are many welfare activities like long service and retirement awards on 14th July every year for employees, to be categorized into 15 years long service and 25 long service.

There is also welfare trust which formed by Bajaj Electricals for providing loan to employees for housing needs and also for the reimbursement of medical expenses. They have created “social responsibility of buiness fund” to provide scholoarship to employes and children for higher education and also there is emergency assistance in the form of financial assistance to the family in case of death of any employee in harness.

By Priti Shah

Laurent & Benon Management Consultants Ltd, a public limited company with its corporate office Gurgaon with Pan-India presence. We as an organization strive to offer the right Human Resource Solutions at the right time and enable our clients to enhance the net worth of their human resource capital.

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