What fun and low-cost fringe benefits/perks would you offer to employees?

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/1498/what-fun-and-low-cost-fringe-benefits-perks-would-you-offer-to-employees

by ochekurishvili • 15 years ago

28 42 15 years ago

answers.onstartups.com

wgx• 15 years ago

Treats. Free donuts, coffee, pizza, beers, etc. That kind of thing is low-cost and highly appreciated.

Plus there's the communal, social factor of all eating/drinking together as a team.

pagekalisedown• 15 years ago

Only if you throw some fruits in there.

As a health-conscious (non-preachy) vegan, I feel left-out otherwise.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

1. be neutral about where work gets done

2. be neutral about when work gets done

3. be neutral about how work gets done

acgourley• 15 years ago

Recognizing everyone has their own patterns and giving them the autonomy to maximize work given their own patterns is certainly important. Of course step 0 of this prescription is hiring someone who is trustworthy and self-aware.

argeron• 15 years ago

I completely agree, and that is why we will have a completely web based system so that I can hire contractors all over the U.S. and let my normally onsite employees work from home a day or two a week. Instead of me saying, "Work at home tomorrow", they will choose the day and I will OK it. Obtaining input from employees makes them feel valued and important. Besides, I trust that they will know when it's OK to work at home.

I also plan to ASK each person what a good reward would be (everybody is different), and make sure to thank them. I understand that it's their job, but it goes a long way to boosting everyone's morale and productivity by saying you appreciate them.

A friend's boss wanted to buy her a small token of appreciation for successfully completing a huge project, and my friend jokingly said she wanted a Hummer. The boss bought her one - a diecast collectible H2, and 6 years later my friend still says that was the best gift she's ever gotten :)

bugsy3• 15 years ago

1. Respect 2. Autonomy 3. Control

None of those cost money yet so few workplaces value them since disrespect, micromanagement, and industrial era style division of labor are addictions of the corporate management crowd. It's gospel to Ivy League educated and Old Money.

As a separate issue, "As startups, we can't really offer top-dollar salaries to our employees." is complete nonsense. First of all, "we don't pay top dollar" is doublespeak for "We pay below market rate." Nothing says "We don't respect you." as much as that does. If you can't at the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent you require you shouldn't be in business. End of story.

kanamekun• 15 years ago

"If you can't at the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent you require you shouldn't be in business. End of story."

One of the key pillars of the startup ecosystem is that you can offer someone equity in exchange for significantly "below market rate" wages. In some or even many cases, this will be below the "the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent ... require[d]."

If you view that as a sign of disrespect, then you should probably only ever work for 1)bootstrapped businesses that are pretty far along the bootstrap curve or 2) venture-funded businesses that have significant funding. That's a totally viable approach to working for a startup, and I respect you for refusing to work under less than a given rate.

But I don't think it's fair for you to impose your minimum wage upon others. Some people are willing to work for more nascent businesses in exchange for more upside. That should be their right too.

esk• 15 years ago

I haven't a clue why this is being downvoted, unless the point you are making is too obvious. Perhaps the parent was only describing startups that neither give employees equity nor pay them at market rates?

Do many startups try to pull stunts like that?

tptacek6• 15 years ago

This is not a helpful comment. It only sounds like one. In fact: since nobody on HN would sponsor a "respect-free" or "autonomy-free" or "control-free" work environment, it actually doesn't say anything at all.

This is frustrating because there are probably a million things we could do for (e.g.) Matasano team members without having to restructure the business, and I'd love some more ideas.

DaniFong4• 15 years ago

We are exploring an alternate mode of vacation (one might say, the French model, although not because it is not national) -- in which the company essentially shuts down august till labor day, on top of a couple weeks of ordinary flexible paid time off. We hope that this will enable people to take real vacations (without worries that something really important is happening around the lab), and the lab isn't hamstrung when missing someone important. Plus, a month of free time allows people to take a serious sabbatical and do something really substantial outside of work.

Those we around a month of productivity, we think that people will end up being more than 10% more productive/happy/creativity, and the people we can attract may be 10% better suited to our work. We think it's a perk hardly any other american company can match; great hackers value their time.

More than any of these, philosophically, we want to allow our colleagues to experience the world. We want them to experience freedom.

rdl2• 15 years ago

Your Amazon thing is awesome and something I plan to copy.

jeffool5• 15 years ago

Depending on your business and your employees? Equipment.

I recently worked at a TV station and regularly asked my boss if I could do things like borrow a camera on a weekend, or installed a single game for some of us to play after hours when no one was working.

The answer was always "no". That was unfortunate. The camera I kinda get; it could break. But using my computer at work, when no one else is? Seemed relatively harmless.

elemeno• 15 years ago

It's less harmless than it than it looks.

No is the only sensible answer to both of those questions, purely for liability reasons.

If the camera gets damaged while you're out doing a personal project, is it still covered by the station's insurance? Quite possibly not if it's not being used for work purposes.

If you download a game it turns out to have a virus in it, where does the liability for that fall?

If he'd said no to things like "Would the company pay for a Wii for the team to use in it's off hours", or something like that and he said no, then it might seem more churlish - but your request just don't seem like ones he can easily say yes to to begin with.

jeffool5• 15 years ago

I understood my employer's concerns. I hold no ill will for those answers. But I do think that, with the appropriate legwork, those suggestions can give rise to exactly what the OP is asking for.

There's a good chance that the company has access to hardware/software of various types that his employees don't. And there's a chance his employees would like to use it. Would it be covered by insurance if something went wrong? Definitely something to check on. But that phone call is likely free for him, and a potential higher premium may not be too much higher. It's just an idea to consider.

And things like hosting a PC game for people can be very safe. Certainly no less safe than installing a web browser on a PC. It just takes a little legwork to make sure it's trustworthy (like any software you install) and finding a game people like. I suggest it because I find it analogous to going to the driving range. "It's Friday afternoon and there aren't any vital issues. Let's get in a couple of rounds of XYZ and head out."

m0nastic4• 15 years ago

One of the most awful forensic engagements (that didn't involve the threat of bodily harm) I ever worked was for a company who called me in to image the drives for an entire video production department.

Apparently, they discovered that one of their employees, in his spare time, had used one of the editing stations to edit video for his church. When they disciplined him about it, he stated that "everyone else was doing the same thing", which made them panic and decide to treat the whole department as a forensic incident.

I can't think of a more innocuous use of resources than "editing church video in my spare time", but they were all freaked out about it. You'd be surprised what companies worry about.

I had the envious task of imaging ~ 35 workstations (and 2 big-ass RAID arrays) in the middle of the night before employees were supposed to be back in the office the next morning.

rmc• 15 years ago

They were probably worried that some other employee was making sexually explicit videos, or even worse, videos of child sexual abuse. If that was happening, it might come out eventually. If it came out that the company was also aware that employees were making personal videos, then that's potentially bad PR for them.

jeffool5• 15 years ago

Ahah, you poor soul.

I guess the thrust of my argument is that... Employees are trusted with those resources while under employer supervision. ("Supervision"; not that their bosses are over their shoulders, or in some cases even know how to operate it themselves.) But the second that the intent is not approved of, suddenly that employee is suspected of having destroyed everything with an errant keystroke. It's funny, is all.

scotto• 15 years ago

Let people choose what tools they use to get the job done. It really sucks to be forced to use inferior tools/software/hardware/etc at work than what you have become accustomed to using in more progressive environments.

tptacek6• 15 years ago

The scotch library is pretty silly.

1/2 day on Halloween is a great idea.

I am not a fan of company-sponsored lunch; it sends a message that you're expected to be working constantly. Many of the big finance companies do it, and the employees are clear about why.

Books are so cheap relative to FTE cost, I don't know why you'd even come up with a "training policy" for them. We just give everyone an Amazon account and say "go to town". You buy a book, it's yours; the only rule is, don't buy books for your friends on our dime. :)

jeffool5• 15 years ago

I think you raise a good point about company lunches. It depends on if it's "grab some food on us and go eat at your desk," or "put out tables and sit beside people you don't know" kind of lunch.

kabdib• 15 years ago

Quiet hours, especially in a cube farm.

Free soda, coffee, tea. (I'm a little negative on free snacks, but if that works for you, okay).

Subsidize access to things like the ACM portal, or other subscription journals. Buy technical books for people.

A shooting range in the basement. ("Let's go think about this problem over a few rounds" has a different flavor). While zoning and other laws would make this impractical, some of the groups I've been in have had "range days," and they've all been a lot of fun, even -- or maybe especially -- for the newbies.

rdouble• 15 years ago

Proscribed fun is hard. I can think of about 20 great engineers who would be turned off by a scotch library and free trips to the driving range (is it software for country clubs?) Substitute any of foosball, ping-pong, beer kegs, red-bull, razor scooters and whatnot. You're only going to please half the people, half the time, and probably the wrong people, because who really ever liked razor scooters and nerf guns, anyway?

Career and skill development is a perk that is really overlooked. It's a start to offer unlimited Amazon books. However, companies could go much further and offer seminars and full blown courses. It doesn't even have to be expensive corporate training. You could pay a grad student to teach a full blown machine learning course for less than half the cost of a weekend long training seminar.

tptacek6• 15 years ago

We would generally be happy to consider sending people to a class. But I don't think we're too different from a lot of companies with HN presences in that we're staffed mostly with people who enjoy figuring things out for themselves. It's hard for me to think of a class that's so clearly valuable to our team that it would make sense sending people to.

One thing we try to do is to run internal classes. We had one on C programming that I need to get back up and running; we have a long-running one with cryptography.

Businesses routinely do the equivalent of paying a grad student to teach machine learning; they just don't call it that. In the real world that's called consulting.

jontsai• 15 years ago

I would have couches and sleep/napping areas--a lot of them.

I think the best and most essential things to quality of life are: air, water/food/drink, exercise, sleep. I find that there is an unsurprising correlation that when I am healthy and fit, I am also able to perform my best at the computer.

rhizome• 15 years ago

The best perk is to manage development in a way that doesn't require overtime from the programmers.

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

Don't forget to review Dan Pink's talk on motivation:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Having said that my personal favorites are unlimited free books a la Matasano, and flexible work environment (working from office or remotely are interchangeable), and flexible vacation policy (several recent HN posts on this).

Completely distributed teams like SpiderOak are pretty awesome, so set up your company to work like that as the default, and have an office people can work/meet in when they want or need, but connect to the servers the same way whether in or out of the office (a universal API, so to speak).

Let me work when I'm most productive, be it 6am to 3 in the afternoon, or noon to midnight, or whatever. Trust in my incentive to care about the company's success (and by extension my own cashflow). I don't even mind a pager in setups like that, as long as it's used for emergencies only and not abused.

patio11• 15 years ago

My company had an official holiday -- Company Founding Day -- adjacent to a national holiday every year, turning a 3 day weekend into a 4 day weekend, and required anyone wanting to work on Company Founding Day to get signed permission from the CEO. (Of a 1,000+ employee megacorp.) When customers/vendors complained about a particular employee's inavailability for their needs, everyone could just say "Sir, I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do. It is Company Founding Day."

That costs rounding error next to an employee. Fog Creek-style catered lunches are rather substantially more expensive, but having done them, I think the social benefits to them are pretty awesome. (Company-sponsored dinner, on the other hand, would scare the heck out of me.)

tptacek6• 15 years ago

We did a "company offsite" instead of an extra holiday; we spent the morning building Arduino robots†, and the afternoon at Three Floyds. I'm sure there's someone here ready to say "that's not a benefit! just give me the freedom to choose what i do that day myslef"[sic]. Oh well. I'm guessing I'm not too unhappy about missing the opportunity to work with the kind of people who would complain about stuff like that.

† More accurately, the rest of the team made robots while I went and rented a huge van.

rdl2• 15 years ago

Range time; tactical training. Also disaster prep for you and your dependents. (ie come to the office after the bay area earthquake....)

What fun and low-cost fringe benefits/perks would you offer to employees?

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