GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS

3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

Introduction Are your employee benets valued?

Businesses have a tough job of nding the right mix of benets to keep employees happy, but also meet the bottom line. There are important, complex benets such as health care and retirement that deserve in-depth planning and strategy, which we wont tackle here. Instead, were going to look at creative employee benets that go beyond telework, exible work programs, and other so-called perks. The kind of creative benets we have in mind address many of the reasons why we have employee benets in the rst place.

WHY LOOK AT ALTERNATIVE AND CREATIVE WAYS TO BENEFIT YOUR EMPLOYEES?

Stand out among your competitors Attract the best talent in a tough labor market Retain loyal, experienced, and talented employees Boost employee engagement Save money on turnover and hiring costs Increase customer service and satisfaction rates Remove barriers that keep employees from being productive

Your benets package is an investment. The return on that investment is sometimes hard to calculate, but heres how some of the top companies have measured the impact of their employee benets:

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

A Harvard Business Review poll of the Principal 10 Best Companies showed that 75 percent of employers felt that their benets package had a signicant impact on employee retention, with 58 percent stating that it had a signicant impact on the company's ability to maintain a competitive advantage. "At the most basic level, high retention translates into low turnover costs, and the 10 Best winners have, on average, voluntary turnover rates that are less than half industry averages," the report states.

In the 3 Step Guide to Getting Creative with Employee Benets, well show you how to tie your benets plan to the bottom line, demonstrate a few creative benets that your employees will truly value, and then show you how to experiment with and pilot the changes in your workplace.

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

Step 1: tie workplace changes or benefits to the bottom line

A company is only as good as its employees. Investment in those employees impacts the bottom line for your business. How are you investing in recruiting, retaining, training, and motivating your employees? Here are some costs to consider when planning a creative and competitive employee benets program.

Turnover costs: Employee turnover costs include salary, wages, recruitment costs, loss of productivity, impacts on team morale, and other more subtle expenses. Some estimates of the cost of replacing one employee are 30-400 percent of the persons annual salary.1

Engagement and motivation: Towers Perrin discovered that highengagement rms grow their earnings-per-share (EPS) at a faster rate (28%) while low-engagement rms experienced an average EPS growth rate decline of 11.2%.2

Real estate and overhead costs: What are your overhead costs for maintaining a traditional ofce environment? What would be the cost savings of transitioning to a mobile workforce and reducing some of your real estate needs?

Vacation days, sick days, and paid time off: What are the costs associated with paid time off? Additionally, what are costs and resources involved for tracking and managing this time?

Investing in your employees makes practical business sense, so you dont want to throw away your investment on benets that employees wont use or value.

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

Make a solid case for why you want to modernize your employee benets package by tying it to the bottom line. Demonstrate how changes will affect the productivity, engagement, retention rates of your employees, as well as other cost-saving measures.

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

Step 2: Make a plan

What kinds of benets do your employees and future employees want and expect? What kind of culture is attractive to the new generation of workers? Generation Y employees are entering the workforce with entirely new expectations, demanding the liberty to work wherever, whenever, and however they want. Now, 69% of workers believe it is unnecessary to be in an ofce in order to get work done.3 But were not offering exible work programs and were going way beyond telework here. Those kinds of so-called perks arent really benets at all. Work done from home (or a coffee shop or the beach) is still work. These employees are still delivering value. If the value doesnt change, then its not a benet to do the work remotely... especially when employees must adhere to the same rules and guidelines that dont make sense in todays day and age. Programs arent enough; corporate culture has to change to keep up with technology and remove the barriers to productivity.

CREATIVE BENEFITS THAT GO BEYOND PERKS

UNLIMITED VACATION POLICY The concept of unlimited vacation or no vacation policy is becoming a popular idea. Large companies like IBM, HubSpot, and Netix have kicked the standard two-week vacation policy to the curb. I feel that it only increases productivity because it allows people to work when theyre able, and not in a conventional

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

9-5, ve days a week schedule. --Sharon Rosenblatt, Accessibility Partners4 A few things to consider for a successful implementation of an unlimited vacation policy:

Re-think the 8 to 5, Monday through Friday work culture. People are working at odd times, even in an 8-5 work at the ofce environment. Youre checking email before bed. Youre answering a call or question over the weekend. Do you submit vacation time if you dont work Friday, but then work on Saturday? Start by analyzing the reasons why you have employees account for vacation time. Ask yourself: Does time automatically equal results?

Dont take away vacation time cold turkey. We want to stress a key point here: The problem is not vacation. Its tracking vacation time that is the problem. One way to ease into this new policy is to stop tracking vacation time in little chunks (ie., 2 hours/4 hours, or 1 day here and there). Some companies account for vacation by days or weeks; some track in such small increments as 2 or 4 hours. Others lump all vacation, sick, and personal time into one big bucket of Paid Time Off (PTO). So if I need to visit the dentist in the afternoon, I might have to submit 4 hours of vacation time or PTO even if I do my work that night.)

Communicate a future goal of when vacation time will not be tracked. Its important to communicate with staff a timeline of future goals. It takes people time to adjust. It takes time to stop banking those vacation days, like its a savings plan or a badge of honor. Look at how much money Ill get when I leave this joint! or I have 2 months of vacation time! I am so busy and important I cant even take time off!

Value: No more time and resources wasted on tracking vacation, PTO, or sick days. Employees take time when they need it and are still responsible for getting their work done. Organizations experience increased productivity and employee engagement. Ultimately, employees feel more connected to the success of the

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

organization in a bigger way. They feel accountable. They also feel trusted and appreciate being treated like adults. COMPREHENSIVE WELLNESS PROGRAM Does your ofce have a gym? Do you have group exercise classes, weigh-ins, nutrition experts, and incentive programs for staying healthy? Wellness programs are a hot topic right now. Naturally, with out-of-control health care and insurance costs, companies are looking for ways to save money and keep their employees healthier. Now think aboutthis: Do your employees sit at a desk from 8-5? Do they stress out about staying home sick from work, or staying home with a sick child? Do they get nervous thinking about dwindling or non-existent paid time off? The point were making is this: the traditional daily grind at the ofce doesnt promote a holistic concept of wellness. Wellness programs are great, but does the company culture undermine those same programs? We have to think of wellness in bigger terms if we want to truly promote the health and productivity of all employees. In a study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, changes in the behaviors of employees who had gone through Results-Only Work Environment training were then measured against the behaviors of those who hadnt gone through training. The data shows that a ROWE isnt just a morale booster, its a way to improve the health and productivity of your workforce.

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

Employees report seven health benets in the study

More sleep Improved energy Better overall health Guilt-free time off Early treatment for illness Reduced stress Improved mental well-being

Value: A healthy, productive, and focused workforce. The benets of a ResultsOnly Work Environment are multi-faceted and include improved health and stress levels, productivity, and efciency for employees and the organization as a whole.

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

ALTERNATIVES TO RELOCATION When you want to recruit the best talent you often think of having to move them to where you are located, and that can be expensive. But these days work is something you do, not a place you go. With so much data in the Cloud, employees often ask why they must live in a certain place to access it. This means you can have the best talent working for you without making them uproot themselves (and their families in some cases). Other organizations will ask you How did you get them to relocate? And you can say We didnt. In a Microsoft 2011 poll, 62% of people said they could get their job done at a remote location, but over half of those surveyed said their company doesnt have the infrastructure or culture in place to allow them to work wherever they chose.6 Technology for a mobile workforce

Videoconferencing tools like GoToMeeting and WebEx make online meetings easy, whether youre meeting internally, or with a client Instant messaging tools like Skype or Google Chat can help with collaboration and staying connected Apps like Liquid Space can help you nd ofce or meeting space at locations around the country Cloud-based apps like Dropbox or Google Apps make the need for location-based servers and IT teams unnecessary (depending on the complexity of your needs)

Performance management tools like WorkSimple work the way employees do: nimble, collaborative, and results-driven

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

Value: Hire the best talent without the constraints and expense of relocating them. Give employees what they really want and value: freedom to live and work the way they see t.

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

Step 3: Experiment
Start slowly. There may be push-back from upper-management, so take the time to implement gradually and demonstrate success. Pilot your plan with a small team, then gather data to make your case for non-traditional benets. You can also check out case studies from organizations of all size who have put similar plans in place.

Conclusion
Stop investing in benets that your employees dont need or want. Start getting creative with benets that are highly valuable to employees. By implementing a modern workplace culture like Results-Only Work Environment, you increase productivity for the organization, remove barriers to efciency, and give employees control, autonomy, and motivation to do their very best work. The workplace must adapt and offer contemporary benets in order to attract, retain, and motivate the modern workforce. Results-Only Work Environment includes all of these key benets: unlimited vacation policies, comprehensive focus on wellness and employee autonomy, and alternatives to relocation. In our years of implementing ROWE at organizations large and small, we know that these are not only benets that employees crave, but they are proven ways to increase productivity and efciency in your organization.

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

About Results-Only Work Environment Results-Only Work Environment goes beyond telework.
Its a management strategy where employees are evaluated on performance, not presence. In a ROWE, people focus on results and only results increasing the organizations performance while cultivating the right environment for people to manage all the demands in their lives...including work. Created by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, these two social visionaries curbjumped traditional exible work options and created the Results-Only Work Environment from within the bowels of Corporate America while at the same time, juggling families, careers and all the other demands of life. Wait did we say demands? The traditional solution of exible schedules is not the answer to managing lifes many twists and turns. Work sucked. So they went beyond telework and set out to x it. Today, Cali and Jody are leading a global movement to forever change the way we work and live. Their vision: to make ROWE the Status Quo. Learn more about implementing a Results-Only Work Environment at www.gorowe.com, or contact us at info@gorowe.com

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN

Sources (unless cited above)

1

Sage HRMS ROEI: Return On Employee Investment Towers Perrin, Closing the Engagement Gap: A Roadmap for Driving Superior

Business Performance, Global Workforce Study, 2007-2008, p.5.

3

Cisco connected report Company, March 2012

4 Fast

Journal of Health and Social Behavior, December 2011 Microsoft 2010 Remote Working Research Summary

GETTING CREATIVE WITH EMPLOYEE BENEFITS: 3 STEP GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PLAN