What makes a good office perk?
When companies tighten their belts, they look first to discretionary spending. Meta got rid of free laundry for its workers last year. In January Google announced a round of lay-offs that included 27 in-house massage therapists. Salesforce, another tech firm, has axed its contract with a Californian “wellness retreat”, where employees would have done God-knows-what with each other. The chopping of such benefits has been christened the “perkcession”. But just as perks get cut in bad times, so they return in the good. Eventually you can expect to read articles about a “perkcovery”. What makes a good perk?
Dispensability is part of the point. This is not like a salary or a health-care plan; if it cannot be cut, it is not a perk. Views on what counts as a discretionary benefit can shift over time. Before the pandemic being allowed to work from home every so often was seen as a perk. Anyone who still describes it that way has failed to grasp how much the world has changed for white-collar workers. By the same token many of the perks that are now being cut were designed for a pre-pandemic world of long weeks in full offices. Last month Google warned that services at snack bars and cafeterias were being reviewed because attendance patterns had changed.
Working out which perks are valuable to workers is hard. Asking employees may not always yield good answers. A poll conducted last year for Trusaic, a software firm, asked American workers what perks they would like to see introduced: the top answer was hangover leave. Perks that sound great in theory may not work out that well in practice. Several firms, Goldman Sachs and Netflix among them, tout the fact that they offer members of staff unlimited holidays. But other companies have abandoned the policy because the absence of clear rules leaves employees unsure how much time they can really take off; some take less than they did under a fixed allocation of vacation days.
2023-04-20 10:11:14
Article from www.economist.com
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