How to Get Creative With Employee Benefit Packages

In a recent piece published by startup-focused, European media company Sifted, the chief marketing officer for a mental wellness platform offered some interesting ways to conceptualize employee benefit package composition and ideas where to best incorporate creativity and outside-the-box offerings into the mix, in addition to providing some creative examples. 

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According to Sancar Sahin, CMO and Co-founder of Oliva Health, there are three categories of employee benefits that companies need to be thinking about.

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The first category is the foundational tier benefit offerings, which should ensure that employees are productive and in good health. If an employee isn’t able to properly function at the required level because of disability or illness - whether bodily or mental - that can obviously have reaching and sometimes compounding effects into that person's and the company’s ability to operate. 

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The range of offerings that fall within this category of benefit is quite large, including both many of the core offerings that make up most benefit packages like access to healthcare and psychological services, as well as other benefits that can significantly help facilitate employee health and/or productivity, like comprehensive child/senior care support and providing healthy snack options in the break room. 

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The second category of employee benefits to consider are those that further instill and/or reflect company values, like schedule flexibility and professional development opportunities, which underscore employee autonomy, employer trust, and a commitment to continuous improvement and growth on behalf of both parties.

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The third group of benefits are the kind that allow employees to thrive beyond just fulfilling expectations, optimized to help them achieve both professional and personal goals. This third category of benefits is often the best place to get creative and explore ideas/perks/benefits that may be less common or untested. 

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When it comes to creativity, of course, coming up with a good idea is typically easier said than done, which is why it’s often a good place to start with an existing idea and tweaking it to better meet your needs and/or repurposing it in a different context to achieve a different aim altogether. 

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Some of the examples of creative employee benefits that were highlighted in the piece are broadly applicable and could be easily incorporated into existing benefits packages, like ‘pawternity’ leave, which is one brewery’s practice of giving employees one week of paid leave once during the course of their employment to take care of a newly adopted rescue animal. 

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Other examples of creative perks from the article are a bit more specific to the company that devised them, like the e-commerce brand that awards employees who stay with the company for 15 years by giving them busts of their own heads delivered by the company’s newest hires. While that kind of quirky gift and ceremony is not so easily transferable to a company where it didn’t organically grow from an inside joke, it serves as a reminder of the value of leaning into the cultural touchstones that naturally arise out of your own company culture. 

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While there is no way to guarantee the generation of a creative idea when it comes to employee benefits strategy, of course, utilizing this framework to conceptualize your company’s employee benefits strategy overall and seeking out creative benefit and perks ideas that help employees thrive in their work and personal lives is a great place to start, whether borrowing good ideas from outside the company or formalizing organic ideas that are generated internally.

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You can find that piece and read more about this topic here. 

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