I used to think - what's the point in benefits and perks at work. Surely all everyone wants is more money in their account at the end of the month, anything else is just avoiding doing that.
I recall us once saying something like this to an employee—
We'd like to reward you for your great work; we'll either pay for you to go on a short trip away, or you can have this chunk of cash, which would you prefer?
It felt like a great offer, and nice to put the choice in their hands. We thought they'd accept the experience, but given the choice they took the money.
We should always pay our employees what our business can afford and what they are worth. But ultimately, pay gets consumed into a big bucket and goes towards bills, rent, mortgages and commitments. It's to be protected, saved and rationed.
Benefits are more like prizes. Whether you like it or not, you've just won (X)! Ta-daa! You don't get to exchange them, and that's great, because if you did, you'd never actually feel rewarded because there'd be no separation.
We once had a wake-up call about company benefits. An employee called a meeting with me and basically said they were leaving to join another company unless we started offering a list of benefits they had been offered.
Weird - it wasn't about the pay. Just the benefits. Pay is ultimately an expectation, part of the furniture.
It's what else the company offers that truly tells the story of the kind of people they are, how they think, what it's like to work there, how much they care for employee welfare, and whether they care about people joining and sticking around.
It was this meeting that made us sit up and take notice. But the hard part was recognising what we, as a small business, could actually do about this. This other company was way bigger and was offering all kinds of things. How on earth could we compete with that?
This has taken time. We've iterated, reviewed, tried things and scrapped things. Figuring out what we can and should offer is a piece of work that is never finished.
But benefits don't start and end with a list of typical extra goodies. Many of our benefits are actually things we don't do.
Pool tables, arcade machines, "Free Pizza Fridays". We've tried them all.
Ultimately though they're often gimmicks, designed to keep people in the office as part of a "culture", when in fact they could be out taking a walk, getting fresh air, or getting home to spend time with their family, or just relaxing, switching off and doing nothing at all.
Becoming a remote working company has really forced our minds on this kind of thing.
Another thing we don't have is lots of calls and meetings. You wouldn't think to consider this a benefit or perk, but if you've come from an organisation that's meeting-heavy into one that isn't, then you've gained something valuable - time.
Time and space to actually get great work done, time to think without being interrupted, and time that isn't stolen at the end of the day when a meeting over-runs.
A benefit can be something you're not doing that everyone else is, not just things you're offering that others aren't. They're really two sides of the same coin.
We also want to make it really easy for our team to get on and do their work and not get hung up on administrative tasks that can be truly painful in other businesses. So:
- We make it really easy to book holiday and get it approved quickly
- We don't fret about taking time to go to medical appointments, or adjusting when your workday starts and ends
- We give everyone an expenses debit card, so they don't have to pay for stuff themselves and then wait to be paid back
- and we've written (and continue to update) an internal company handbook, as a place of reference for everyone to read and contribute to about how the company is run.
It goes without saying that remote working is also a huge benefit to many people too. The flexibility to work wherever you want and if that's at home, be able to schedule other parts of life around it, like looking after a dog for example.
We previously utilised a service called Perkbox, which is a company benefit scheme that offers discounts to employees for a wide range of high street brands and services.
It's great, but we felt it had run its course for us. You have to pay attention to what your team actually uses and values. There's no point having benefits people aren't benefiting from, even if they sound like good ideas.
We chose to reinvest in giving every member of our team a personal budget, not only for company expenditure like courses, books, travel and accommodation, but also to help out with costs outside of work like entertainment and leisure subscriptions.
We've gone from spending on something that not many of the team were using but seemed good, to something that everyone is using so we know is good.
This was a difficult one to get right. People don't tend to know what they want until you actually start offering it and you see if they make use of it. We tried asking what people wanted and that didn't really work. It's not their job to know, and it can be awkward to have an open forum for suggesting ideas.
We used to celebrate birthdays in the office with cake and decorations. Remote working took this idea away by default, so we replaced it with giving people their birthday off instead.
More recently we added another holiday scheme, this time adding a day of annual leave for every year a person stays with us, up to a total of 10.
You never know if these ideas are going to work. We've found that trying things, for 6 months or a year is the only way to find out. See what works and what doesn't.
Announce to your team you're trying something and label it as an experiment so everyone knows this is a trial. That way the expectations are clear.
Then review it at the end of the period. It might stay, go, or be tweaked. Be open to feedback, both as a group and individually, in case people have concerns that they'd rather share in confidence.
Being thoughtful, flexible and compassionate is a good start in all of this. Big businesses are often tied up in layers of management, moving slowly to implement changes, and by pure logic cannot possibly care as much for every individual - there's so many, if they don't get it right this time, someone else will be along soon anyway.
Being small in business and staying that way is a benefit in itself. Small means nimble. Small means the top is adjacent to the bottom. Small can make decisions in an hour rather than a week.
But small business doesn't get a free pass. It has to compete with the big business next door whether it likes it or not.
If that's you and you don't feel like you can match what they're offering, it's not game over. Ignore the unreachable and focus on what you can do that your team will truly value.
