How to Choose Benefits that Will

Make Your Small Business Feel Like a

WRITTEN BY: HARBOR AMERICA

Great pay, great benefits, and maybe even a great location or workspace. It’s these kinds of perks that are typically assumed when thinking about great workplaces because they’re the ones with the most airtime.  This is especially true if you’re a business owner looking for ways to build up your company’s reputation as a great workplace. In that situation, it’s easy to look at companies that make the “Best Places to Work” list year after year and compare their seemingly endless amount of resources to yours. It’s easy to feel like you’ll never be able to offer the same level of perks and benefits, so of course, you’ll never be able to attract, or retain, the same level of talent at your company. 

As easy as it is to believe that line of thinking, in today’s economy, it can’t be assumed that you’ll only be able to offer great benefits once you get to a certain level of success. Why? Because, unless you’re offering next level benefits from the beginning, you’ll never attract the talent that will help take your business to that next level. So, what’s a business owner to do?

What does that mean? While you may not be able to offer the same exact benefits pound for pound from companies like Google, HubSpot, or Facebook, you can follow their pattern of thinking to offer benefits and perks that will help your company become a great place to work. At the end of the day, being a great place to work has to be the goal if you’re serious about the success of your business.

JW Mariott

This is true not only on a philosophical level, but also on a practical level, because when your employees love working at your company, it’ll be hard for them to leave, saving you the cost of bringing new people in. And, when you’re looking to expand, employees who love the company they work for are the best kind of recruiters you can have, boosting the kind of talent you attract. When you compare the  costs between adding benefits that will help attract and retain employees, to the cost of having a revolving door of employees, the answer is simple: offer benefits that help accomplish the former while avoiding the latter. So, how can you follow the pattern of Fortune 500 companies when it comes to the benefits you offer? 

If you think there’s a one to one causality relationship between the kind of perks you offer and the kinds of people your company attracts and retains, you’d be wrong. Perks and benefits as standalone items can only indicate so much about the kind of workplace your company is. But, if you understand how the benefits you offer communicate how much you value and care for your employees, you can begin to choose benefits and perks that reflect those values. 

It’s the reason why companies like Google offer incredible perks and benefits to their employees because they understand how those benefits and perks intrinsically communicate how much they value their employees. Take their complimentary, free, gourmet buffet they offer to their employees for example. Google knows the foundation of their own success is how successful they are at helping facilitate and build quality relationships within their organization. So, they use the benefit of incredible free food and close-quarter dining to promote relationship building that can at least serve to help engender a feeling of connectedness and at most serve to provide a pathway to groundbreaking collaboration. They understand that quality relationships are what help unlock the potential in people that trendy workspaces and coffee bars can’t, so they offer a perk that helps accomplish that.