Chapter Twenty-nine
“We’re all working together; that’s the secret.”
—Sam Walton
Your business should do everything and anything it can do to take care of and protect its people. That means a laser focus on your mission and bottom line to ensure that you can maintain your sustainability. If you run out of cash or if you burn through money too quickly, you’ll bring your mission and your dream to a dead end.
As Practice Makes Perfect continued to grow and evolve, so did my views on productivity and work. We realized that if we created an environment that expended people daily, we’d have two or maybe three years, if we were lucky, before they burned out. Armed with that knowledge, we knew we needed to make changes quickly or else we would lose the people we needed to solve our problem. As we started to think about hours spent and productivity, we considered what the total environment looked like. We wanted to build an incredible company that everyone would be proud to work for.
Benefits are attractive and may keep employees on board longer. However, a company that is around for the long term is more attractive than a company that exists for a couple of years with massive amounts of benefits. The first five items below are pretty standard, easy-to-implement items to consider in designing your company’s benefit package. Items six through ten are advanced benefits that a startup should probably not implement right away, but should aim to implement in the long run.
- Work Hours:
This makes a HUGE difference. Our office hours are 9:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m. People feel less guilty about leaving when they’re supposed to leave. They also feel like they’re going above and beyond just by staying thirty additional minutes, instead of having to stick around until midnight just to show how hard-working they are.
- Federal Holidays:
This is an easy way to boost morale. Besides, if they have friends who aren’t working because of the holiday, it demotivates them. Additionally, the federal government tends to do the closest Friday or Monday to the actual date giving people a three-day holiday. At Practice Makes Perfect, we take it a step further; we give people the days between Christmas and New Year’s off too.
- Unlimited Vacation:
This one is a bit tricky because research shows that people tend to take fewer days off when they have an unlimited vacation policy than when they don’t. To combat that, we have two compulsory days off that every employee must preplan with their manager at the beginning of the quarter (not including federal holidays). We’ve been doing this for over a year now and haven’t had a single case of abuse.
- Work from Home:
We give our managers full discretion over this. I’ll admit, this is one of the perks that I’ve struggled to fully embrace, because I like to see the people I’m working with. But working from home might be ideal for some people, based on their situations.
- Work Essentials:
These things seem pretty basic, but we provide a monthly stipend for professional development, transportation, gym, and phone.
- Total Health-Care Package:
We cover the entire health insurance premium for our staff members and their families, including dental and vision. We also provide life and disability insurance.
As we continue to think about our new benefit corporation designation, we want to continue pushing the envelope of being a company that puts its people first. Here’s what we’re hoping to meaningfully incorporate over the next few years:
- Comprehensive Family Leave Policy:
We want our expecting parents to feel supported and encouraged.
- Tuition Reimbursement:
Though our compensation and benefits are pretty comprehensive, we want to continue to support our team members’ personal growth and development.
- Home Purchase Assistance Program:
We want our team members to have the opportunity to fulfill the American Dream, and understand that the down payment can sometimes be a huge barrier to home ownership. We plan on providing team members with up to 20 percent of their initial down payment for their first home in the form of a forgivable loan that is paid down with service for our company.
- Employee Stock Ownership Program:
A little more than 50 percent of our full-time team members have stock in the company. We’d love to formalize a program and get to a point where 100 percent of the people who work with us have the opportunity to own a piece of the company they are committed to building.
Full disclaimer: these perks are expensive. Instead of phasing them all in at once, you can add them in gradually. I think the startup industry could benefit greatly if we started to think about our longer-term impacts instead of our short-term profits to please an investor. There isn’t anything revolutionary in here that companies can’t do to put their people first.