What employee benefits do you offer your staff or have come across that don’t have a direct financial cost to the business?
Hey @ZoeN . No doubt this will depend on the size/type of your organisation and knowing what matters to people there, but we are under 100 ppl currently (hyper-growth) in a tech environment, so being somewhat in our infancy in this regard has meant trial and error is usually accepted thank, goodness! I recently rolled out with groups of our people which covered “benefits that have an impact on you/for you”. We captured all the feedback data, did a deeper dive into cost vs value add/impact and went from there according to what we could afford.
In a nutshell, the data definitely confirmed that most benefits are going to have a direct financial cost to us in some way shape or form, even offering a day of free leave can be expensive.
We therefore focused on two areas, (Culture Code) which is based around values led initiatives (e.g. lunch and learns with experts within our own business, their industry contacts, investing more time in catch ups and 1:1, ran group wellness activities at Bondi Beach with our yogis, and sport players etc) basically giving time and connecting, providing better more meaningful flexibility, bring your pet to work, school holidays, bring your children (not that many parents saw this as much fun as non-parents seemed to haha) but they appreciated the activities we put on and the fact they didn’t need to pay for care. This is basically the free stuff.
Then we looked at high impact low cost (but definitely some cost) initiatives. Which isn’t really what you’re after, most of these needed to happen for the needle to move in terms of appreciation for perks or benefits and the engagement stuff. Like I said, there seems to be cost no matter how we did it.
That being said, what we did live by, is that there is nothing is more beneficial to someone than having a Leader who they love working with and they feel gives their work life purpose and connection. So we continue to focus on building those leaders of the future and caring about our people, investing more leader time in everything.
We are also currently working on Purpose initiatives, so volunteering time to your preferred NFP, although again, we have budgeted the cost at a day per person.
I hope some of this is helpful. The sessions I ran I’ve also done on scale at the last professional services firm I was at - also very useful info, just needed to organise many more sessions for over 2000 people. Good Luck 
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Thanks for taking the time to share your experiences and learnings. It’s reassuring to know that I’m on the same path with a ficus on leadership development - I truely believe it has the biggest impact on employee engagement.
Hi @ZoeN
I worked for a while at a not for profit who gave us an additional 2 weeks of annual leave each year. It was an awesome gesture but there were two things that were particularly challenging, first, finding the time to take 6 weeks a year in a busy NFP with limited resources and then as the organisation grew, being able to find ways to continue to financially support this initiative.
In reality what mattered the most to me was flexibility on office hours and at the time brining my new pup to work. In the next role I took, I was still able to bring my pup, but the flexibility wasn’t there. Now, I have the flexibility to work where I’m most productive and I value that over an additional two weeks a year of annual leave or bringing my pup to work!
Hope this helps
Deb