Tips for keeping employees flying high
Happier workers tend to be more productive, and more productive workers tend to make employers happier. It’s not a bad circle.
How to keep employees happy is always a conundrum – no favored perks come free, so each investment in labor force benefits comes off the bottom line. The question is how much are businesses willing to reinvest in people.
Columnist Chris Tomlinson this week writes about the Cassidy-Sinema Parental Leave Plan, a bipartisan bill now in the Senate, as one step in the right direction.
“About two-thirds of voters believe workers should have access to paid leave to care for a new child or a family medical crisis, according to polling by Pew Research Center,” Tomlinson writes. “The debate is over how to pay for it.”
In fact, he argues, in states that already have such programs, the bottom-line impacts have been nominal.
“Eight states are already mandating paid family leave with innovative financing mechanisms.,” he writes. “According to a study published last year by Denver University researchers, the new Colorado program will only cost workers and employers 0.34 percent of current wages.”
If that’s the case, he argues, the debate, then, isn’t about money. “The problem is convincing politicians that paid leave is a good idea. The Cassidy-Sinema Parental Leave Plan should be an excellent first step.”
Of course, parental leave isn’t for everyone.
Over at FlightAware, the Houston company whose founder and chief executive, Daniel Baker, is in conversation with our Andrea Leinfelder this week, the perks are more in line with its mission.
“Early on, 100 percent of people here were pilots,” Baker says. “We understood air traffic control, we understood flight plans, we understood airplanes, we understood the relationship between airports and airplanes.”
That changed as the flight-tracking technology company expanded both its breadth and its employment base. Still, flying is at the heart of the enterprise, and to encourage that the company pays for training.
“If you say, ‘I’ve never flown in a small plane before. I want to try it out,’ FlightAware will pay for that. If you say, ‘I like it. Let’s do the flight training,’ FlightAware will subsidize it and then give you bonuses for the first time you solo, for getting your private pilot’s license,” Baker says. “And FlightAware’s flying club owns an airplane that’s used for flight training. There’s no requirement, but anyone who wants to can do it.”
One thing that’s not taking off is the oil and gas business.
In Fuel Fix this week, we report on the squeeze lower prices are having on the region’s mid-sized players.
It seems only a handful were able to capitalize on the boom and get out before the glut hit, leaving laggards and those catering to them – namely M&A shops and PE firms – struggling to hold on.
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