Choosing The Right Employee Perks

A people-first approach to benefits builds a great culture

Culture and leadership go hand in hand, and today’s companies can suffer or thrive based on the decisions that leaders make about culture. Anyone can describe their ideal culture, and few are able to achieve an enduring culture status that everyone benefits from consistently. The difference is in the ability to leverage empathy for your employees and “walk the talk.”

 

Respecting the person, and acknowledging that work is just one aspect of their lives and who they are, goes a long way towards earning the trust and respect of your employees. When leaders neglect the fact that their employees have lives outside of work, they set up a very natural but strong conflict for every single employee. Every time an employee has a personal issue to deal with, in the traditional company cultures in the U.S., that personal issue must be kept outside of work, not ever brought into work, and not ever affect the work an employee does. But reality and human nature don’t work this way.  

If you’re investing in office-only perks, like a communal keg, foosball table, or unlimited snacks and food at the office, then you’re still putting the company above the employee. If you’re encouraging people to bring their pets to work, you are certainly helping them logistically, but you’re ultimately encouraging employees to spend more hours in the office. While these are nice offerings, they won’t do much for the employee who, for example, has a sick child at home. They won’t help the triathlete get a few extra hours of training to meet their personal fitness goals.
 
They won’t help the employee dealing with a sick parent, or spouse. I really believe in treating an employee as a whole person that exists outside of the office and respecting their life outside the office. If an employee is stressed out because of personal life issues they will not do their best work, and oftentimes they will resent you and your company. If you give employees space, time and respect to deal with personal issues, I believe that you get those resources back tenfold through retention, loyalty, commitment to the company, and better productivity and creativity. 
 
There are other real-life perks that you can give employees that can really make a difference to them as whole people. Employees who eat healthy and exercise are happier, more productive, and sick less often. Clearly, scientific data supports this idea and points to people who exercise and eat healthy as people who are also mentally more acute, and innovative.

A lot of companies have fitness benefits, but we’ve tried to take this a step further and make sure employees realize we really want them to go workout. Our employee gym membership program actually decreases in costs the more you go to the gym each week. If an employee goes once a week on average in a month, then $80 is taken from their paycheck. Go twice a week, pay $60, go 3 times a week, pay $40, and if you average 4 times a week per month you only pay $20 per month. By creating a real financial incentive, we are not just talking the talk about fitness, but actually walking the walk, and spending more money on employees who go to the gym more often.
 
Another unique offering we have is our policy that kids are welcome in the office. If your child has a dentist appointment at 10 am, it probably makes more sense to bring your child into the office for the morning and save yourself the extra trip or logistical work to get them to their appointment.

Whenever we have a school snow day, we welcome everyone’s kids in the office and bring out extra iPads and computers to keep them entertained. We realize that if we can help working parents with logistics and give them space and permission to bring kids into the office, our employees will pay it back tenfold through loyalty and productivity.
 
Having a culture that treats the employee like a whole person is critical for us because it reflects the mission-driven business. We have a mission to help people succeed in business. We care for and respect our customers and we want to extend the same care and respect to our employees. Ultimately, we also want to hire the very best, and we know that creative people with strong leadership skills or critical thinking abilities are likely to be people who also have vibrant lives outside of work.

It would be hypocritical of us to expect to hire the best when we can’t acknowledge how this plays out in their personal lives. I believe that people who are happy to come to and be at work will produce better more innovative work.

Many companies have paid time off and sick policies that set the stage for employees to have to lie about staying home with a sick child or parent, or dealing with an out of work commitment. We think that if you don’t give your employees room to handle a situation - like a sick child or a parent - then you are forcing them to deal with an internal dilemma.

They will need to figure out how to comply with a time off policy, while also dealing with how to take care of a very personal important situation.  When employees don’t feel trusted to make wise personal and professional decisions, they end up feeling forced to be dishonest about their time and ultimately have to compromise their own ethics.
 
This is something we want to avoid at all costs - we never want our employees to wrestle with their personal ethics just to succeed professionally and personally. Unfortunately, many companies seem to have this backward. When an employee has to make up a story to explain why they’re late, they are often perceived in a negative light when, ultimately, it should be about hiring the right people and then empowering them with the right resources, policies and above all care and respect.

I believe that you can’t fully understand how to support the unique lifestyles of your employees unless you personally empathize with their needs and desires. Developing a strong culture has been a very personal experience for me. I don’t think I completely understood or even believed all of this until I became a working parent. That’s when I realized: I will never choose the company over the well-being of my child, ever. It would be wrong to assume any different from my employees.
 
As a personal policy, I never ask something of an employee that I wouldn’t do myself. This shows up in small ways on a daily basis: if I expect employees to wash their dishes in the communal kitchen area, then I know I must follow the same expectation. I’ve opted to not rely on a personal assistant, I book my own travel, I move chairs around when we host an event. These little things add up and keep me accountable when considering culture and what real perks look like.