David Batstone
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by David Batstone with Caralee Adams
Corporate executives love to complain about benefit plans. Who can blame
them? Faced with intense pressure to slice expenses and fix their balance
sheets, benefit expenses look like the fat cow in the pasture that they
cannot butcher.
Truth is, employers turn out to be the biggest winners when perks match
worker needs. Innovative benefits keep a company's best workers around
longer, lead to higher morale and boost productivity.
Companies indeed are deploying innovative benefits to put fun and purpose ?
if not convenience and ease ? back into work. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
offers lunchtime yoga classes in the firm?s meditation center ? a 24/7
department the company set up at a cost of a couple hundred thousand
dollars. ClifBar lives up to its healthy outdoor image with a functioning
climbing wall hovering over its office cubicles. The energy bar company also
sponsors any employee who elects to ride in charity bike events. Business
software company Hyperion offers to employees bonuses of $5,000 toward the
purchase of a hybrid or other fuel-efficient car.
Innovative benefits enjoyed their heyday back in the dot-com era as
companies competed for top talent. Once the bloated dot inside the com
burst, however, most companies scaled back on lavish perks and went back to
a meat-and-potato benefit package: health care and pensions.
Now, with the economy and job market improving, executives are looking again
at benefits as a way to recruit and retain the best workers. At a minimum,
companies want to be recognized as an employee-friendly place to work,
according to Katie Popp, a project director at The Great Place to Work
Institute, a research and management consulting company based in San
Francisco. "Companies are starting to pay attention to...what employees need
in life," says Popp. "It's less about money to give employees expensive
things and more about treating employees with respect and treating them
fairly."
Put another way, employees are looking for more control over their workplace
environment. "Don't forget, this is a new breed of employee that are not
just employees, but modern consumers and 21st Century citizens," explains
Katherine von Jan, trend director of Faith Popcorn's influential think tank
BrainReserve.
Von Jan notes that worker expectations will become even more dramatic as the
group she calls Millenials enter the workforce. Thanks to Baby Boomer
parents who encouraged their children to think for themselves and challenge
others, including authority, this generation is entering the workforce
demanding to be heard. At the same time, the Boomers are approaching
retirement age and want to spend their last few working years with a more
enjoyable balance to their lives and workplaces. Add to that Generation X,
which places family and personal endeavors over career advancement, and
you've got three major blocs of workers who can turn the system in a whole
new direction.
Consider how Triage Consulting, a healthcare consulting firm based in San
Francisco, is offering creative benefits to its workers. Consultants
typically work Monday through Thursday out of town for about four months at
a stretch. The company picks up the tab for one of three options on the
weekend: Consultants can fly home, fly to another city or have a family
member or friend flown into their location for the weekend. "It allows
employees to maintain a work-life balance," says Vanna Shir, a director at
Triage since it started in 1994.
And then there is the sabbatical perk for frequent travelers at the
170-employee company. For every month consultants spend out of town, they
bank one day toward a sabbatical to take at the end of their fourth year. In
1999, her co-workers sent Shir off with a case of peanuts as she embarked on
a six-week sabbatical with her husband to visit 25 baseball parks across the
country. "We are like a family. It makes me very proud of where I work,"
says Shir.
*Kate Yandoh in Atlanta and Carl Kozlowski in Pasadena, Calif., contributed to this article.
*For a more in-depth look at innovative perks, read the feature by Batstone
and Adams in the new Sept/Oct issue of Worthwhile, now at newsstands
everywhere.
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