Dreaming up great benefits is the fun bit of designing your remuneration package. They’re also a key part of bringing your culture and values to life in a tangible way.
As the Weirdly team grows and spreads into new markets, we find ourselves talking more often about what benefits we could design that would really bring our values to life for our people.
Rather than go straight to the usual gym membership and catered lunch ideas, we tapped our customers and PeoplePeople slack community for a dose of inspiration and uncovered some creative, unexpected and frankly, pretty exciting offerings.
The list is too good not to share so without further ado, here are some of the coolest benefits organisations are offering their employees around the world.
I mean, this crew know how to live and breathe their values and that certainly shows in the benefits they offer. With their focus on equality - in the workplace and in relationships, it makes sense that they have a wealth of family-centric benefits up for grabs.
Alongside their 16 weeks of paid parental leave, they list IVF/Egg Freezing and Breast Milk shipping amongst a list of supportive offerings.
General health is a priority for their employees too and, like a lot of companies we came across they provide healthy catering and ‘booch on tap. What’s a bit different about the Bumble team is they also provide a $100 monthly wellness benefit for each employee. This is a super-cool way to show your employees you trust them to know what’s right for themselves, and to avoid the one-size-fits-all wellness programme trap many corporates are falling into.
Oh, and being able to get a haircut right in the office sounds pretty appealing too, tbh.
Speaking of wellness programmes, there seems to be a surge of orgs offering counselling and therapy to employees. Companies like Buffer provide their people subscriptions to therapy app, Joyable as a way to help them manage work and life pressure.
In a similar vein, Wag gives each employee access to free, licenced therapists to help maintain their mental wellbeing. It’s a great way to round out the premium insurance and healthy snacks parts of their health benefits package.
I probably doesn't hurt that you spend your days with these puppers either.
It’s not just the hipster startups making with cool benefits these days. Deloitte’s listening hard to their employees and providing great offerings like on-site physio sessions and pet insurance alongside their generous family-support benefits ($25K reimbursement for adoption costs gets a double high-five from us!).
It was hard to choose a favourite benefit from this crew, but the Career Break offering was the one that got the Weirdly team buzzing the loudest. A three to six month sabbatical to pursue personal or professional growth opportunities is a brilliant idea. On their career site they list this as “Time to refresh and renew to help increase effectiveness, creativity, and productivity”. I mean, is there anyone who can honestly say they wouldn’t benefit from a bit of that?
For some of us, being able to take blocks of time away from work is less about professional development, and more about wrangling tiny humans during school holiday times. EY Australia has introduced a new “Life-Leave” programme. Employees can opt to take six to 12 weeks of life leave a year to do anything - from traveling to working part-time to spending more time with their kids.
Alongside this, they’re offering a similar Term Time offering where parents can choose to work full time while schools are in session, and part time while the kids are home for holidays.
Our personal care-relationships go far beyond juggling kids during school holidays of course, and NewsCorp's US team are working hard to make sure their people have the extra support where they need it.
To help the increasing number of people caring for elderly parents or family members, they’ve introduced generous compassionate leave, emotional and practical support initiatives. Employees in this position are also offered subscription to Wellthy - an app that helps with care coordination and planning and helps alleviate some of the administrative load for these carers.
It’s inspiring to see companies like NewsCorp leading the way on this kind of employee engagement. Facilitating people to manage the challenging and rewarding responsibility of caring for ageing family indicates they’ve really been listening to their employees. Which you know, is a pretty great “benefit” in itself!
Honestly, so many people shared their favourite benefits with us, I could go on all day. We’re excited about digging into some of these ideas and coming up with a list of uniquely “Weirdly” ideas of our own. In the meantime though, we’re keen to keep the inspiration coming. Share your favourite benefits with us in our PeoplePeople Slack community, or anywhere on social media with the hashtag #BestBenefits.
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