What makes a company a best place to work? Flexible hours, gym time, and unlimited vacation days: these are the perks that drive the best workplaces in America.
In today’s hiring market, comprehensive benefits and enticing perks are essential to attracting and retaining top talent. We looked into what some of the “top places to work” had to say about their approach to keeping employees happy. You should try to factor as many of the below into your employee experience!
1. Compassionate Leadership
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner is a firm believer and advocate for “compassionate management.” This is the understanding that the role of every manager is to remove “the boulder on the chest” of employees and alleviate their suffering.
It’s experiencing another employee’s struggles and challenges that interfere with his or her work, and doing everything within your power (as a manager, or even as a colleague) to alleviate that suffering — to “take the boulder off their chest.” Weiner says, “[T]his all goes into this concept of managing compassionately and I think if organizations can learn to do this at scale, it’s a complete game-changer.”
2. Benefits for the Whole Family
Company benefits should focus on allowing people to integrate work and life outside of work.
Rebecca Cantieri, chief people officer for SurveyMonkey, takes care of employees with innovative and industry-leading benefits that includes extended parental leave programs to ease an employee’s transition back to work, holidays, sabbaticals and bereavement pay.
In addition, SurveyMonkey offers unlimited personal time off, 16 weeks of paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers, extended bereavement leave and more.
3. Make life easier
Concierge services. Paying for food. Offering benefits to help people get to a from work. Or dare we say it…wellness benefits?
4. Emphasis on Referrals
Many companies offer referral programs to find new employees (this is similar to how companies use referral reward incentives in their sales and marketing programs). Referral hires are 14% more likely to retain employment within the company. Salesforce acquires 58% of their new hires from employee referrals. They have been known to give referral rewards such as first class round trip tickets to a destination of their choice!
5. Trust Building From the Top Down
Managers that show trust-building behaviors will retain happier employees, thus boosting performance across an enterprise. That can include behaviors such as recognizing peers and co-workers for excellence. Giving people the option to work from home or control what type of work they do. Or more popular recently, sharing company news broadly, early and often.