Quirky Employee Benefits
Employees have, quite frankly, grown tired of beanbags, pool tables, and birthday cakes and have made it their mission to find a company that offers the most unusual benefits.
“Showing the money” isn’t always the best method of incentivizing employees. Sure, no matter what anyone says, the money will always play some role when it comes to selecting a job, but after years of working for the same company, employees will start to feel less motivated.
Essentially, it all comes down to “What can I do for you?” To get the best out of your workforce, this is a key question every business leader needs to raise — and it just so happens that benefits are crucial when considering what steps to take. When you invest in your employees’ physical and financial health and wellness, you build improved team morale and save on the costs — both in time and money — of employee turnover.
According to Qualtrics, Millennials say they’ve had an average of 2.29 jobs over the past five years. That works out to a job switch every 26 months.
I’ve mined through the internet’s hottest (and not-est) employee benefits lists to help you bypass the fads and discover truly creative benefits your teams will genuinely love.
Raise the Office Vibe
- Ring the Coffee Gong
Slack is one of those fab startups with an employee nap room. But don’t worry, they’ll help you wake up too. The “coffee gong” rings every day at 3 pm to remind employees to kick back and grab a cup of joe. Workplace socialization has important psychological benefits, and can even offset some of the big health risks that come from sitting at your computer all day.
If your employees are the head-down types, a coffee gong just might be the perfect way to spark some positive interaction and beat the afternoon slump.
2. Take your meetings To-Go
Stale office air is a major drain on employee productivity. And so are unnecessary meetings. LinkedIn’s ‘Walk and Talks’ are a great example of how you can liven up internal meetings and make everyone feel more productive, with a simple stroll around the block.
And if you can walk the beat on the nearest nature trail, even better. A University of Michigan study found a 20% increase in short term memory performance for participants who walked among the trees, compared to those who walked down city streets.
3. Bring a book to work
No one wants to feel like they’re clocking into one life at 9 and another at 5. Employees want a work environment where they can be themselves. And what could be more personal than the book on your nightstand? At Penguin Random House, employees get to bring their books to work, take reading breaks, and have group chats about their summer reading lists.
Reading on the job is an easy (and totally free!) way to show your teams you get it: There’s more to life than work.
4. Loosen Up
Try as we might to keep employees happy, there are times when things just get tense. According to the Mayo Clinic, laughter really is the best medicine. And what better way to have a laugh than with Puppies.
The team at this innovative and creative tech start-up “Chartbeat” has it’s own designated “Puppytorium”! Employees are encouraged to bring their pet pooches into the office. The ten cute pups even got to choose their favorite room to hang out in — which turned out to be the library.
Next Level Health Benefits
5. Quality Care Anywhere
Now for the serious stuff.
If there’s one thing everybody hates, it’s navigating insurance networks. But health insurance is the #1 benefit that matters most to employees when accepting a new job. It pays to do it right.
Tech is here to help. Tools like Doctor on Demand etc bring professional physical, mental, and even maternity healthcare services, straight to employees’ mobile phones.
Most telehealth solutions are pretty affordable and can work within your current insurance plan with a low copay, or alongside it, with a flat fee. And the ROI’s not bad either, Cisco reports savings of 20–30% on costs for employees who use their telehealth services.
6. Make it a mission for mental health
At Barclays, mental wellness isn’t just an employee health benefit, it’s a core belief. On the company’s website, analyst, Uzair Patel, who suffers from depression, openly shares his experience with Barclays’ ‘This is Me’ program.
“As a global company, Barclays needs to show our colleagues and our community that we offer support. It’s right not only from an economic point of view but for moral reasons too,” says Uzair.
And Barclays’s commitment to mental health isn’t just an internal initiative. In January 2017, the high street bank announced it would train employees to provide support for customers suffering from financial abuse or mental health problems — a truly creative way to pay it forward.
7. Stand Up for Mental Health
Finally, one of the boldest mental health campaigns is Amex’s ‘Healthy Minds’.
In 2015, they completely revamped their EAP and transformed it into their award-winning mental health program. Every year, as part of the National Alliance on Mental Illness’ #IWillListen campaign, the company invites employees to share personal stories via video and social media.
And their employees seem to love it. Amex’s ‘Healthy Minds’ program has a 98% internal satisfaction rate.
Wellness perks they really want
8. Mentoring & Coaching
There’s a lot of talk about the differences between millennials vs. Gen Xers vs. boomers, but at the end of the day, we all want the same thing:
A healthy, happy life at work and at home.
Asana was named one of the 25 best small workplaces in the Bay Area by Fortune Magazine, and we think we know why. The 240-person company offers formal, external mentorship and life coaching as part of their benefits package. The program includes an all-star list of coaches to help with anything from improving interpersonal relationships to hands-on engineering mentorships.
Self-improvement is a fundamental aspect of Asana’s culture, and with a 4.9 rating on Glassdoor, it seems to be doing the trick.
9. Wellness Card
To help keep its employees healthy, Eventbrite offers workers a $60 monthly wellness stipend. They can use it on anything from gym membership fees to juice cleanses while Expedia UK supplies employees with a ‘Wellness Allowance” of anything between £400-£1200 to spend on fitness-related items of their choice such as running shoes, gym memberships, sports clubs, etc
Standout Engagement Benefits
10. Student Loan paydowns
For employees who already have a degree, student loans can eat into their paycheck for years. That makes companies like PwC, which provides help paying down student loan debt, especially attractive. PwC offers its employees $100 per month, totaling $1,200 a year, strictly toward student loan debt. The benefit is available for up to six years, which, factoring in interest, can help employees save up to $10,000.
11. Paid Pro Bono Work
Charity work is growing in popularity as a way to make employees feel they are valued for more than their salaried contribution.
Helsinki-based digital consultancy Futurice sponsors employees an extra €15 an hour on top of their salary to work on open-source coding and other social impact projects. Employees have worked on open source applications such as the VLC media player and the blogging platform WordPress. In a recent employee survey, 40 percent said the scheme made them enjoy working at the company more. Also, the employees who took part showed higher engagement levels.
The indirect support offered by Timberland to its employees as paid time off up to 40 hours per year to volunteer is well appreciated on glassdoor.
12. Commuter Benefits
Commuting is expensive, particularly for workers who are driving to the office or taking public transit to meetings throughout the day. Offer pre-tax commuter benefit cards, parking and bridge toll reimbursements, and ride-share allowances to cut down on commute costs. New York City has a law mandating that if an employer in the city has 20 or more full-time employees, it has to offer employees the opportunity to purchase pre-tax commuter benefits. This law went into effect on January 1, 2016.
13. Travel
The key to getting it right is to blend benefits and culture and make offerings relevant to your workforce. Holiday accommodation marketplace Airbnb, for example, offers employees $2,000 to travel and see the world. While TripAdvisor offers a travel reimbursement of $250 or more, depending on how long an employee has worked at the company. It also offers discounts on packages offered through the website.
Parental Benefits 2.0
14. It’s all about the babies
By 2030, millennials will account for 75% of the workforce — and more than a million millennials are becoming parents each year. Now’s the time to start getting some seriously creative parental benefits in place.
Companies like Facebook and Google offer stellar parental benefits (e.g., 5 months paid parental leave, 24-hour lactation consultant, and free breast-milk shipping for traveling mothers, the list goes on!), but they’re not the only ones.
Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream franchise is a great example of how smaller companies can get in the game, simply by adopting a unique perspective on the cost of parental benefits.
Any Molly Moon employee who works at least 20 hours a week, and has been with the company at least a year, gets 12 weeks of parental leave at full pay.
Ikea has a generous policy for new parents: It offers up to four months of paid parental leave for employees who have worked there for at least a year, and it isn’t just for full-time employees — part-timers get the perk, too. And it doesn’t matter if you work at one of Ikea’s retail stores or at its headquarters.
The way they see it, the cost of covering parental leave is nothing compared to the long-term benefits.
15. Save a Parent’s Day
It’s no secret working parents are under extreme pressure.
According to a 2014 study from Cornell University, context switching has a big impact on stress and productivity — especially for women, as they’re twice as likely than men to experience more than 20 switches a day between, work, social and family roles.
Companies like Google, Starbucks, Genentech, and AOL offer onsite daycare facilities — but let’s face it, those guys have massive budgets. That’s why this creative benefit comes from Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop. The small franchise allows on-employees parents to take time off to attend their kids’ events and activities — no questions asked.
16. Make a Date Night
The rate of the decline in relationship satisfaction is nearly twice as steep for couples with kids than for couples without kids.
Did we mention parenting is stressful? Veterans United came up with a truly creative solution. They treat their working parents to a ‘Parents Night Out’ every three months and even provide a list of recommended babysitters.
And the gesture seems to be well-appreciated. The company has a 4.6 rating on Glassdoor.
17. Don’t forget the Fur Babies
We know you’re sick of bring-your-pet to work posts. But there are other ways to support your pet-loving employees.
For example, Scripps Health offers pet health insurance for cats and dogs. And if your fur baby has ever been sick, you know just how big a perk that is.
BrewDog offers Pawternity Leave for employees to welcome a four-legged arrival to the family. Gaining trust, housetraining and working out routines take time so we have decided to make things easy by offering Puppy Leave. It’s like Parental Leave, but with more throwing of sticks. Take on a new dog (either puppy or a rescue dog) and our employees can have a week away from work to start that lifetime’s bond.
Now that you’re armed with creative (and cost-effective!) employee perks and benefits ideas, it’s up to you.
