After a year working from her flat in Berlin during lockdown, Chiara Baroni was desperate for a change. When her employer, fintech company Revolut, announced in April that its over 2,000 staff could spend 60 days a year working anywhere in the world, she jumped at the chance. Baroni, who works as a communications manager, turned a ten-day visit to a friend in Tenerife into a two-month beachside working holiday.
“The winter in Berlin was very cold and gloomy and we had a hard lockdown,” Baroni says. “I felt like a change of scenery might be useful for my mood and my productivity.” Jim MacDougall, Revolut’s vice president of people, said this move was part of the company’s “ongoing focus on employee experience and choice”.
The pandemic had given birth to a revamped package of non-core perks. The company also began repurposing offices so they are more like collaborative spaces, replacing big kitchens, dining areas and a lot of desk space with its sofas and seating areas. It is a major shift from two years ago, when Revolut, like its peers in the tech sector, sought to attract staff by offering perks like free food made by in-house caterers and swanky offices.
But with physical office spaces still largely out of bounds and no plan for the entire workforce to return, everything from nap pods at Google, three meals a day at Facebook, lunchtime jam sessions at Spotify, or relaxation lounges at Zynga have become largely redundant. Joe Wiggins, a career trends analyst at employee review site Glassdoor, says that as most businesses are rethinking how their offices are going to operate in future, they are having to revamp their perks policies too.
“We’re seeing a lot of evidence that perks are evolving quite dramatically,” he says. “Those that mattered most [to staff] were always core benefits like pensions and healthcare. Free food and fun break-out spaces are cool, but they’re not going to keep people in a job if the fundamentals aren’t there. Fast-forward to Covid and no one is in the office anymore; we saw new perks emerging like contributions towards home offices, mobile phones or broadband. That was the initial wave, but as everyone dug in for the long haul we’ve seen more companies introducing mental and physical wellbeing perks.”
For staff like Baroni, the shift in focus is a welcome development. Not so for the people involved in providing pre-pandemic perks, though. The people employed to make the free food, lead yoga and meditation lessons, or even to provide in-house DJing services, who have not worked during the pandemic, may not ever return. Richard Brook has built up a business providing in-office yoga, pilates and mindfulness classes to corporates, with clients including Facebook, law firm Cooley, online gambling company Kindred and the airline KLM. He says his work — for which he was paid £70 per hour-long class — dried up as soon as Covid-19 hit the UK and has fluctuated in the months since.
“I don’t want it to sound like a sob story, but the work ceased pretty much overnight,” he says. “We picked up quite a bit of work afterwards with Zoom calls, but on two or three occasions throughout the pandemic when it looked like restrictions were going to change that has stopped and there’s been no work again. By the end of November I was down to two or three clients and earning about £150 a week.”
Brook does not expect things to pick up if lockdown is fully lifted on June 21 because he says employers are “caught between the rules” and are taking the view that their staff are now free to go to gyms of their own accord. “They won’t run classes online because staff can go to the gym but they can’t do them in the workplace because of space restrictions,” he says.
Sarah Hunt, whose business Sarah Hunt Yoga provided workplace classes for clients including Facebook, ratings agency Fitch and accountancy firm Deloitte, had a similar experience to Brook, with clients initially moving to online classes only for those to drop off as lockdown progressed. She was able to replace the lost income by offering disco yoga sessions, which she presents alongside a DJ, charging corporates £400 a time as one-off events.
“Luckily for me, disco yoga got bigger,” she says, claiming that companies including Facebook, Gumtree, Moonpig and LinkedIn have all booked sessions. “They don’t want a weekly yoga class on TV, they want something fun and upbeat that comes along once in a while.”
Like Brook, Hunt is not yet clear on what clients might want as their staff start to return to the office on a more regular basis, though she says the newfound focus on wellbeing has made her start developing programmes that incorporate pre-meeting meditation sessions.
As corporates themselves adjust to new working environments, one-off perks like Hunt’s disco yoga classes appear to be growing in popularity. London Sound Academy founder Buster Bennett, who organised in-person DJ lessons at WeWork’s 2017 Summer Camp, says he is receiving a growing number of enquiries from corporates keen to offer their staff remote experiences. Not all are realistic about what that might entail.
“We got quite a few over lockdown,” he says. “We were in talks with Google about doing something, but they didn’t quite get the limitations in terms of everybody needing equipment. They were just interested in doing something online and wanted the social aspect.”
Google has long been known for its quirky staff perks. In the pre-pandemic world it allowed staff to bring their pets to work, offered free cookery and gym classes and the ability to earn credits for on-site massages as part of its benefits package. Now, the company is following the wellness trend and has introduced what a spokeswoman terms “a broad set of resources to help those who are struggling in a challenging environment”. Rather than hiring people to provide them, Google has turned to technology, using mindfulness app gPause and virtual peer-to-peer mental health community Blue Dot.
In a letter sent to all staff last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the business was also introducing extra days off - May 28 was allocated to all staff as a “reset day” - more flexible working options and greater inter-connectivity for teams that are spread out across a variety of locations.
“For more than 20 years, our employees have been coming to the office to solve interesting problems — in a cafe, around a whiteboard, or during a pickup game of beach volleyball or cricket,” he wrote. “Our campuses have been at the heart of our Google community and the majority of our employees still want to be on campus some of the time. Yet many of us would also enjoy the flexibility of working from home a couple days of week, spending time in another city for part of the year, or even moving there permanently. Google’s future workplace will have room for all of these possibilities.”
Similarly, travel metasearch business Skyscanner, which previously offered perks that revolved around free food and table football, is now focusing on providing benefits such as access to wellbeing app Headspace and is giving staff the freedom to take time out of the day to focus on themselves. And, as with Google’s reset day, Skyscanner closed its offices for a day in May so staff could spend time away from their desks for the good of their own wellbeing.
“After a year that tested everyone, and especially those in the travel sector, we wanted to do something to help people reset,” says Bob Athwal, head of employee engagement at Skyscanner. “The idea was to give everyone a fixed point in time whereby we would all, collectively, put the last year behind us, get a breath of air, and then move forward together to start a new chapter for the company.”
The business is currently surveying staff to see what other areas they would like it to focus on, with a new, gimmick-free benefits package expected to be unveiled in the next few weeks.
Like Skyscanner and Google, Revolut has also introduced extra time off as part of its new employee perks package. Wylie says that between now and November every employee can take two additional days of holiday to focus on their wellbeing, something that will be incorporated on an annual basis. “It’s a lot harder for people in the business to switch off when they’re working from home; they can’t disconnect,” he says. “People can take these two days on top of their holidays to completely switch off.”
Hunt is not convinced all the employers extolling the virtues of wellbeing have realised that yet. Though she says many are currently talking a good game about looking after their employees, not all seem willing to pay for it, with one large employer even offering her exposure on their social media channels rather than money in exchange for a day’s work. “I really hope directors get on board and realise the value of this,” she says. “They would spend a lot more on a night in the pub or the office Christmas party.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
