From eggfreezing to sabbaticals, workplace perks are big business
Building staff loyalty is good for hiring talent, workplace morale – and the bottom line
Every July for THE past decade , Jon Lonsdale, the CEO and cofounder of Octopus Group, a creative agency, has encouraged his 60 employees to pitch tents in a remote field. There, they embark on a two-day festival dubbed Rocktostock, complete with food trucks, bands and games. He says it’s ‘the one thing we do that’s in the diary straight away. It keeps everyone engaged throughout the year.’ The festival is employeerun and led, with staff able to chip in ideas for the following year’s festivities. ‘The underlying purpose is to get people excited about working here,’ says Lonsdale. ‘It’s become folklore, and people apply to the company specifically because they’ve heard about it.’
The promise of table foosball and a fully stocked fridge just doesn’t cut it any more when it comes to enticing the best employees to your startup. Now they expect snacks to be from local providers, says Inamarie Johnson, chief people officer at Zendesk, a customer service software company. ‘Some things have changed, others have stayed the same,’ she adds. ‘Employees want to be engaged in creating the right environment and workplace.’ They also want meaningful connections with their employers – and out-ofthe-ordinary perks. ‘Everyone is competing for the same talent,’ explains Katie Burke, chief people officer at inbound marketing company Hubspot. ‘When your competition goes up, your offering needs to as well.’ With the proportion of freelance workers in the job market increasing, it’s not just other businesses companies are competing against – the lure of working from home can be tempting. Hubspot offers its workers a range of perks, including unlimited holidays, a flexible workday and a four-week paid sabbatical for every five years of employment. ‘There’s a much greater demand for flexibility,’ says Burke. ‘People want to work more on their own time and schedule, and in places that work for them.’
A paid sabbatical is something Lonsdale offers longstanding Octopus employees – and has for the past 17 years. It costs the company money in the short term, but in the long run it’s revenueneutral, says Lonsdale. ‘We work hard, and often find one reason we lose people is they want to go off and do life stuff. If we allow them to have six or eight weeks off, they come back more motivated and stay with the company.’ Zendesk offers employees the chance to refresh by temporarily moving to other departments to build up their skills and knowledge.
These perks are becoming more personalised – and more costly – but can transform the perception of the workplace from a necessary evil to a place people enjoy being at. ‘It’s all part of a self-fulfilling cycle. If you create a home from home, people treat it like a home and build up better familial relationships,’ says Lonsdale.
One of Hubspot’s most unusual benefits for its female employees is an offer to pay for treatment to freeze their eggs. The offer is an attempt to encourage more women to progress up the career ladder, allowing them to choose when to start a family, rather than feel they have to take a career break. It’s a benefit that Spotify also provides to its Us-based employees.
Such perks focus on what’s important for overworked, stressed employees: time. ‘For many, the concept of time being the new money is important,’ explains Charles Cotton, performance and reward adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. ‘These individuals are quite well-off. However, what they don’t have is a great deal of time.’ As a result, paid sabbaticals, flexible work and support through major life decisions are becoming more important.
The goal? Longevity. ‘Individualised benefits packages and allowing people to tailor their own package means people will always want to remain with your company,’ Cotton says. Lonsdale agrees, saying that it’s vital for companies to create bonds to encourage employee longevity, which may affect the bottom line. Recruiters can charge a quarter of an employee’s annual salary to find the right worker.
As a result, firms are ploughing more money into employee benefits – and creating HR departments that are more in tune with employee needs. Burke’s job title was at one point rare, but isn’t any longer. When she first took up her role, she thought that this was ‘a good way to be unemployed in a few years. Since then, it’s exploded; so many organisations have culture teams.’ So have the perks on offer: what was once unusual is now seen as standard – even festivals and egg-freezing.
‘These perks are becoming more personalised – and more costly – but can transform the perception of the workplace from a necessary evil to a place people enjoy being at’