Free food, beer and ping-pong tables — these are just some of the benefits once offered to staff to encourage both physical presence in the office and corporate loyalty.

Many of these perks have vanished, along with the spaces that sustained them — on-site gyms, for example.

A new post-pandemic perk culture is rising, centred on our concerns around health, financial stability and flexibility.

This transformation in how “benefits” are defined is sparking an overhaul of corporate practices, with companies that fail to listen at risk of falling behind.

Even before the pandemic, the perks at Netflix, the global streaming service, were the subject of envy. It offers unlimited holiday allowance and a flexible work policy.

Since the crisis started, it has upped its offering and encourages employees to choose the hours they work. 

Kristian Larsen, a digital producer from Denmark, works for Netflix in Singapore and says this flexibility has been very important.

“If you are forced to sit in this little office room that you have set up yourself from 9-5 every day, that would drive me crazy. But it doesn’t drive me crazy because I know I can do it whenever I feel like. That’s a good perk.”

Until recently, flexible hours, free health programmes and unlimited holiday were reserved for the most generous employment packages — and companies such as Netflix were outliers.

But these benefits could soon become standard in many organisations.

‘ONE SIZE FITS ALL’ IS OVER

“The era of the one-size-fits-all perks is gone. And it’s gone for two reasons. One, people now want a good quality working life — which is critical. But employers also realise that these don’t work,” says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. 

“In Silicon Valley they have things like ping-pong tables and sushi at your desk, which they call ‘wellbeing’. They have them as a recruitment tool, but no one ever uses them.”

Prof Cooper, co-author of Flexible Work, a book that examines the link between flexible hours and psychological health, argues that companies are increasingly moving towards an individualised, health-attuned rewards culture.

And central to this shift is a new recognition of the different needs of older and younger members of the workforce.

For the young, support with finances, personal development and access to the office will be more important in the post-Covid era, he says. 

Some companies have started to tweak their perks to factor in debt relief.

Google has announced it will match student loan repayments up to US$2,500 a month from this year.

NEXT GENERATION PUSHBACK

Younger workers have pushed back against old-fashioned long-hours cultures, highlighted by the recent case of junior Goldman Sachs bankers complaining of a 95-hour week. 

According to Annie Auerbach, who spoke to many workers for her new book Flex, old-style perks were designed to keep pulling employees into the “mother ship” to improve productivity.

“Not only does that seem out of date in a new working culture, which is much more distributed and remote,” she says, “but simply on the data it does not relate to productivity.”

She describes such perks as a “band-aid” for a long-hours culture. 

Much of the “on-campus” holistic approach to perks — on-site laundry, gyms and entertainment — has origins in Silicon Valley, says Ms Auerbach.

These “stay here tactics” will, she believes, be replaced in forward-thinking employers by a more empathetic vision that acknowledges that staff have to attend to their lives beyond Zoom meetings. 

According to Glassdoor, a United Kingdom job review site, about 60 per cent of employees now place more emphasis on perks related to physical and mental wellbeing, such as apps, private healthcare and access to online therapy.

Almost nine in 10 would be more likely to apply for a job at a company that took care of its employees. Millennial employees, who are more likely to switch employers than older cohorts when they are unhappy or unfulfilled, are not “snowflakes”, says Prof Cooper.

“They are the ones that have it right. The reason they are going from one employer to another is because they are not getting what they are looking for.” 

OLD PERKS DIE HARD

Some will mourn the death of the old office perks.

According to one Facebook employee in London, who asked not to be named, the biggest loss for many colleagues has been the free meals — its canteen used to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

“I’d never done a big grocery (shop) since joining Facebook and I’m surprised at how much things cost. Some colleagues are complaining that they chose apartments with no functioning kitchen. The food and flexibility are probably what I value the most,” the employee says.

While many office canteens will reopen, some parts of the perk industry will not return.

Paul Armstrong, founder of Here/Forth, a consultancy that advises tech companies, says previously office-centric services like Perkbox, which provide a range of local offers and discounts, “are not fit for business any more”. 

“People don’t want free coffee, but they might need insurance now, faster broadband . . . ‘We’ll send food to you’ — that is replicating old stuff,” he says.

A new breed of “bespoke” benefits companies, such as Juno and Thanks Ben, will develop packages for employers who want to offer non-traditional perks including meditative gong baths and house cleaning.

But will the movement to replace old perks with benefits that foster wellbeing outlast the crisis?

There is likely to be some shift back to place-based offerings when people return to offices in larger numbers, but the past year has catalysed a fundamental shift in employee values that cannot easily be undone.

“Companies that don’t have flexibility benefits as standard will really lose out. It’s no longer an advantage to have it, it’s a disadvantage not to,” says Anouk Agussol, founder and chief executive of Unleashed, a tech consultancy.

As Ms Larson, the digital producer at Netflix, says: “I’m not saying a company needs to have all the perks that Netflix has, but that freedom of choosing when to work, that would weigh a lot more now.” FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Charlotte Middlehurst is acting assistant UK news editor at Financial Times.