Your Company Could Be Tricking You With Perks

take and stay at their jobs. So, when you're offered a job, you have a compensation package and that big number that we all look at his salary, but there's all this other stuff that comes with it that makes up what you get paid, and so that can include things like health insurance, which most people are accustomed to

getting through their job. But now companies are offering all sorts of crazy things like dog gramming services or egg raising services is or anything that they can do to differentiate themselves from other companies that are trying to hire you. So one of these new benefits that's been popular over the last few years is this unlimited vacation where companies are saying you can take as much vacation as you want. Yeah, all of these perks sound great, and I think that's

part of the idea. Companies know that it's cheaper to pay for these benefits than it is to raise salaries, and in fact, salaries aren't growing at the rate that we've seen these perks explode, and you have to thank of someone taking a job through that question. I asked, which is, would you rather have a little bit more money or would you rather have unlimited vacation? What would

you prefer? Well, I worked on a job where we had unlimited vacation, and I wasn't making very much money, and I can tell you that when I was thinking about leaving the job, I never considered the unlimited vacation as a reason to stay. Yeah, and intuitively, it seems like nine out of ten people would probably feel the same way as you do. Like I think about unlimited vacation and it sounds great, but I don't know what I would actually do with that time, Like I'm not

going to take eighteen weeks of vacation a year. That's not going to happen. And I think companies know that, and they and they consider that when they're offering this benefit. However, it's very easy for me to think about what I

would do with ten thousand extra dollars. Yeah, that's my problem with office perks, or some of these office perks, And I wrote about it in an article titled office parks Are Done, and it was based on those New York Times report of advertising companies that were struggling to keep around employees. So what they did was they just started putting ping pong tables and calgurators in their offices, which um signaled very culture yes, like we're a cool office,

like we're chill blah blah blah. And it didn't really work to keep people around. And that's because ping pong tables. People don't care about that at work. It's not like the type of perk that they actually care about. People want to like their jobs, and they want to get good health insurance yeah, and they want to get paid. And it turned out that advertising was losing people because their starting salary was about forty dollars a year, which

is much lower than competitive industries. So it's kind of like the context that you offer these perks in and how they can attract people. So if you're working at a company that isn't offering you a lot of other standard benefits and salary, you know, the unlimited vacation isn't going to feel so great. I guess that's no surprise that people want to have it all. They want a good salary, perks, and a great place to work with interesting projects. So we found someone who claims to offer

all of that and more for his employees. Our guest today is Jason Freed, the co founder and CEO of base Camp, which makes workplace collaboration software. He offers his employees competitive salaries, good health, benefits of five thousand dollar vacations, stipend to spend on travel, and sixteen weeks of paid parental leave. Thanks for coming on, Jason. So we just mentioned all these really generous benefits that you offer. When did you first decide to of beef up your perks

um when we could afford it? Basically, so we we didn't. We didn't have this kind of generous benefits package when we first launched the company back in but over the years have been adding on to it. So every every year, so we'll add something new if if some people request something, or we have a new idea. So I'd say it's it's sort of been a gradual move. The vacation thing you you mentioned, we've been doing that for about seven or eight years now, so that's kind of a long

standing one and a very popular one. So what were the perks that you had available to employees? Are the benefits when you first launched We first started the company, there's just four of us, so we didn't even think about benefits or perks. It was just like can we pay the bills? And then as time rolled on, we we were doing quite well and we had a surplus, so we're like, let's let's give that back to employees in different ways. So I think one of the first

things we actually did was four day work weeks. So we do four day or work weeks in this summer from May through September. We all had Friday off or if you want Monday off or whatever. You can take one day off a week. And that doesn't mean reduced pay. Yeah, she means thirty two hours a week versus forty hours a week. So that was one of the earlier ones we did, and then over time we've just layered in more and more and more. Was that a calculation that

you made when you were trying to hire people? Was it hard to hire unless you could offer them something like that? Um, We've never looked at perks as carrots in a sense, you know, to to hire people. We've just done it because we think it's the right thing to do, and we have good margins. Were a profitable company, been profitable for eighteen years, and so we're always on the lookout for how to spend that money on our

employees versus you know, in other ways. So while it certainly does, you know, when we hire people, they are very impressed by the benefits package we offer. It's not something we put front and center when we're hiring. It's something that's, you know, someone should be good, they should want to work at base Camp, we should want to work with them, and then the benefits should be cherry

on top versus the reason why people come here. If people come here for the benefits, they're probably coming for the wrong reason. So we kind of push it slightly back. But of course they're very proud of them, and we do let people know, and people have come to know that we offer very great benefits. So it might draw some people, but it's not the reason people typically want

to work here. I guess I'm wondering back in when you first started hiring and offering these benefits, if that was one of the reasons you decided to offer the perks, Oh, just to get new people, Yeah, back when it was a little probably harder for you when you were smaller. Yeah, you know, it really was never a reason why we did it. It's never it's never been to attract. It's been mainly to retain. In a lot of ways, you could say it's it's something we want to do to

keep people who are already here happy. So I do think again that some people come here or are drawn to the place because they've heard of these benefits, but they have to want to work here for other reasons than that. So I just I'm not a big fan of casting or putting carrots out there, or or trying to catch people with the net of of wonderful benefits. I'd rather than be interested in the work and want to work here regardless, and then wile them with the

with the other things that we do. You mentioned that a four day work week in the summer was one of the earlier perks that you started offering your employees. Why did you decide on that one? You know, it was actually a bit of an experiment. We wanted to see what would happen if we worked fewer hours, and so one thing you could say is we'd get less

work done, but that really hasn't been the case. In some cases, you'd almost wish you had an extra day a week, But in most cases, what it actually forced us to do was squeeze things out that we were wasting time on. And so that's why we did that. And of course, you know, people love it. They have three day weekends, so they get to go somewhere and enjoy enjoy the weekend versus just you know, you kind

of your card through a week. Saturday is almost recovery day, and then you feel like you have one day left of of of off time is what Sunday feels like. So when you have three days, people can spread it out, space it out a bit, they can breathe some more. They might take a long weekend or do a road trip or go on a short vacation, and people come back rested on Monday and ready to get back to work. Are there any perks that you introduced that employees didn't

really take advantage of that you then got rid of. Um, we haven't gotten rid of them, but we've certainly we were surprised that more people didn't take advantage of them. For example, we have a coworking or a remote working Let misstep back. Actually, our whole company is remote. Essentially, we have fifty six people in the company and most of them, almost all of them in fact, work remotely. They either work from home or in a coworking space

every every day. We have people across thirty five cities around the world, and we have a coworking stipend. It's a hundred bucks. We just increased to two hundred bucks a month. People can use that towards coworking spaces, and since most of our employees are remote, I would have expected more people to use that stipend. It turns out

there's only a few people that actually use it. Most people tend to work from home instead, either they're not closer to a coworking space or they don't like coworking spaces for whatever reason. Um, but I would have thought more people would use that, but it turns out they don't. We just did increase it, like I said, to two hundred bucks a month, so maybe that will help more people use it. Maybe a hundred wasn't adequate. Um, so

we'll see how that shakes out. One of the ones that people really use a lot is a charity match. So we do a one thousand dollar charity match every year and just increase that to two thousand because people were maxing out at the one thousand dollars. So I'm glad to see that's happening, and I'm glad to see people are taking advantage of that. What else do you hear from employees about the perks that they really like? UM,

A lot of people like the massage benefit. So we do this a hundred dollars a month for for massages, but not at the office. Some companies do these massage things at the office where there's like a masseuse on staff or whatever. But I feel like that's faux relaxation. Like if you're hunched over your desk and then you go get a fifteen minute massage and you get back

and hunch over your desk, it's not really relaxing. UM. So our massage benefit is out of the office, Like you can go to a masseuse wherever you want and you're off time, and we'll pay a hundred bucks a month for that. Another one that's popular is we do this um fresh fruits and vegetables like a CSA share Community Support Agriculture Farmers market share for everybody at home for a hundred bucks a month so they can have

fresh fruit and vegetables for their family. And the reason we don't do this at the office Number one is we most people don't at the office. But also I don't like benefits that encourage people to stay at work. And many companies have a lot of perks that are about keeping you in the office. It's actually sort of a subversive effect. So people have you know, they'll cook dinner, they'll they'll all the on staff chef and they'll and

they'll make dinner for people that to meet. You shouldn't be eating dinner at work, Like that's the wrong place to eat dinner. So we do stuff that's go home and do stuff. Another popular one we do is we will pay for your hobbies. So for example, if you want to learn how to play guitar, like, we'll pay

for that. If you want to learn how to fly a plane, will partially pay for flight school for you if you want to Again, we make software has nothing do with planes, but if we want to learn to fly a plane, will help you with that, and people take advantage of this in all different kinds of ways. And it's just us saying, hey, you know, be interesting, do something cool with your life that you might not have normally done if you didn't have this level of

support from your company. And so a lot of people take advantage of that as well. You have rattled off like different desirable perks in the conversation, and I read somewhere that you said that you're running out of ideas, So what are you going to do to keep employees around next? Well, again, hopefully the people want to stick around because the work is good and and the co workers are good, and the environment is good and they do meaningful work that no one gets in their way

and that sort of stuff. So that's the reason why people stay here. So we're just always looking for things. Things bubble up, people have questions or ask for stuff, and if we think it's reasonable, we'll do it. Um if it's unreasonable, we'll let people know. And uh, you know, but but really, again, I just hopefully it's not the perks that keep people here. It's the work and the and the environment and and having full eight hours of

themselves every day. I think this is actually the most important park we can offer, which is everybody has their day to themselves. A lot of companies, You go to work and people steal your time. They claim time off your calendar. There's meetings, there's conference calls, there's all sort of things going on, and people have no time to actually do the work, so they end up working late or on the weekends, or getting the office really early

before no one's there. So for us, making sure people have a full eight hours of themselves every day with no scheduled meetings, no scheduled time sucks. Nothing like that. Um, that really is the biggest perk of them all. How does being based in Chicago versus Silicon Valley where there is this huge, well known talent war where a lot of companies offer very elaborate perks, affect your calculation about what benefits to offer. So we have nobody who works

for us who lives in Silicon Valley. I don't believe in fighting talent wars or perks wars. I think it's a losing battle, like most wars are, So we just do what we think is right. It doesn't matter what other people are doing. I don't look to other companies to figure out where we should be or what we should do. I look to ourselves and ask our employees what they want. But there's for example, we don't offer equity.

So in a lot of companies, obviously Silicon Valley based companies or tech companies, a lot of them offer equity. I don't. We don't offer equity. We have some profit sharing things that we do, but we don't offer equity. So we have a different take on what it means to be an employee. I don't believe in in the equity angle because most of it ends up being worthless, and a lot of that ends up substituted for for salary.

People take lower salaries in the hopes that they will have this lottery ticket that will pay off one day, and most of them do not. So I believe in paying people real money that they can use tomorrow versus something they may be possibly if the odds lineup, could use in five years. Um. So we have very different take on that as well. I don't like the Silicon Valley culture in in around most things. I think they work people too hard. I think they're unfair. Um. I

think the talent worst thing is kind of ridiculous. I think there's too many promises being made that aren't aren't kepta and are fulfilled, and it it sort of bugs me. So we kind of stays far away from that as we can. You said these perks are not a recruiting tool, and that you offer them because you think it's the right thing to do. But do you think that there's any effect on the work or the product that your company makes from offering all these perks. I think there's

probably something there. I you know, I don't know how to measure that, certainly, I think it's it's the package. So it's we offer great salaries, so we pay top five percent in the industry. We do use an industry salary service to make sure that we're always paying top five percent salaries. So I don't want I don't want anyone to ever leave because we don't pay them enough. Certainly,

some people value certain things more than others. If you really really love to travel, then certainly our travel perk is a wonderful benefit that you probably can't get many other places. But if you don't do good work, if you're not a good person, you're not going to be able to stick around anyway. So you've got to do all that. You've got to care about the company, we care about you, and then hopefully we can we can take good care of you on these other levels as well.

So I do look at it as a total package. Do you ever lose people to other companies or to Silicon Valley companies? Yes, certainly we've lost a few people over the years, and we have very good retention. Half of our company so we have fifty six people. Half of the company has been with us for more than five years. If you add in four years, I think it's something like sixty percent, which is again very rare in our industry. People bounce between companies every couple of years,

so our retention it is very high. But certainly people leave as they should. Um. You know, if someone finds a better fit for their lifestyle or their company, or whatever they want to do in their life or their career or whatever it is, they should go somewhere else. For example, we had someone UM leave for Apple. He's with us for I think four years, maybe five UM, and he went off to work at Apple for his life, his career. He's younger guy. You wanted to try working

in a big company, made perfect sense. But overall, we have very high retention and we're very proud of that. Is there any benefit that you have either considered or just heard of other companies offering that is just two over the top, like you wouldn't consider offering it to your employees? Mm hmm. That's a really good question. Do you do you know if any of you heard of

anything that's really interesting? Um, I mean you hear about all kinds of things in Silicon Valley like people getting your dogs groomed at the office and haircuts and um, you know every But I do get the sense sometimes that that companies will do things because they know it's going to make waves in the press and they're going to get attention for giving that if you're the first

company to offer expert you'll get the press. I mean, there are companies offering paying off student debt, their companies offering egg freezing services. Their company is offering a lot of time off taking care of sick family members. So yeah, we would we would do some of those if if, if, if it came up, and we have done some things like that. We do um for example, every three years we do a thirty day paid sabbatical for every employee the company, so it doesn't matter what role you're in.

By the way, I should mention that every single benefit we offer is available to every single employee. UM. Some of them require you to be at base camp for at least one year, but other than that, doesn't matter what role you're at, what salary level you're at, all the benefits are the same. UM. I think the haircut stuff and whatever, some of those. You know, this is a subversive, subversive stuff that bugs me sometimes because some of that is like we'll we'll have like we have

a salon. We don't. But some companies who say, like we have a salon at the off us so you can save time. What basically what they're saying is like you know, stay at the office, and it just it strikes me is is work first versus benefit first? In that case, Now that's not true for everybody, but a lot of those sort of things are where like they'll do your dry cleaning for you to save you time, Like save what time? It's usually to save you time for not having to leave the office. I'm I'm open

to anything that makes sense. So you touched on salary and money, which I think is also a really important part of the compensation package. Why don't you just raise salaries something like five percent ten percent every year instead of offering benefits. Yeah, that's a good question, and we we we've considered that in the past. UM. We used to offer cash bonuses every year UM, but we found out that UM if for whatever reason they were less

than the year before, people were disappointed. Even though it's technically free money, there's just a very human thing about getting less the next year. It just makes people feel bad. UM. And so we actually limited that and replace that UM with the vacation benefit. And now people have an experience that they'll never forget versus just cash that went off to pay off something they forgot. And that's often what happens.

So you give people cash or higher salary or whatever it is, and they don't know where they spent that extra money. Sometimes you do, but for the most part, you don't just get it gets you pay bills, you do this, you do that, versus hey, taking your family to Morocco is something you'll never forget, or or or going going on a trip and climbing an amazing mountain or something like that, or or taking um the trans

I think it's trans Canadian Railway. We did some really amazing trip across Canada on one of those trains with the glass tops. You know, there's all sorts of amazing things that you could do that you'll never forget. I just think that's more valuable ultimately, especially when we pay people. Well, if we were cutting people's salaries back to provide these things,

I think that would be unfair. It's at some point I think there's diminishing returns of an extra few thousand bucks here and there, versus actually encouraging people to take an experience and have an experience that they might not have had themselves. So it's definitely different point of view, but I think there's more value in the experience than there is in the cash man human psychology. I think

it's fascinating, fascinating. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about parts, and it sounds like base Camp isn't a bad place to work. Well,

thanks for having me as really fun to chat. So when I asked Jason why he doesn't just pay people more money, he brought up an interesting point, which was that after a certain salaries, so I think you have to be making enough money where you're comfortable in your lifestyle and you have to be the type of person where you're not just working to make a million jillion dollars.

But at that point, more money doesn't really have that much of an impact, and that companies have to do other things to show that they want you there and to keep you there. And that's kind of where this Herk's arms race even happened. And I know he was a little bit he didn't want to say he was participating in it, but I think that is what's happening

in Silicon Valley a bit. Yeah, And we should be clear that most people don't have this problem right where they're deciding between more money or more perks or they have too much of both, Like it's a it's a rarefied world where there is such a talent war, and we do think of this as something that's kind of limited to tech um where you know, you get both high pay and good benefits because your employer knows you could get up and get another job somewhere else really easily. Yeah.

I actually wrote an article about this, how having bargaining power and leverage is what gets people the best benefits, and there was research that came out that showed that people who are high skilled, so people in tech, but also some other industries like finance or other white collar industries have the best benefits because they can say, look,

I'm really valuable. But the research also found that there were other types of industries that had really good benefits, and those industries happened to be heavily unionized, so they had like a different type of bargaining power. So, you know, manufacturing, you don't think of the labor as being highest skilled labor, but they actually have really good benefits because they can have leverage in a different way. But again that's not

the majority of the workforce. There are still a huge amount of workers who are neither unionized or in these competitive fields, and it does create those kind of have and have nots of parks. So there are some people who are getting great praternity leave and maternity leave, and then there are people have no access to pay time off right, So not everybody has access to these perks.

But there is one thing that kind of seems to apply across the board to me in these conversations we've been having about benefits and things that you can get at your job, which is that it's really important to think about compensation more holistically than just money. And you know, you shouldn't go to work at a job that has pin punk tables and cool office happy hours if that's

not going to make you happier at that job. But you should think carefully about what things besides money you might want out of a job, because you can negotiate for those things. Are Sally Crawcheck, who has been a guest on this podcast a couple of times, has made the point in the past that you know, if money is off the negotiating table, it doesn't mean that everything is.

And you can ask for an extra week of vacation when you're you know, talking to somebody about a new job or a long distance assignment or something like that. If you know what's important to about a job, it's worth asking for those things and not just keeping it so narrowly focused on money. And I think that's a great time for us to segue too. Half Big Takes, Half Fake Takes. You can call into our hotline and leave your own half big take at two on two six seven zero one six six, And this week we

have a listener with her own half bag take. Hi my name is Emily, and my half bake take is that when you leave the office for the night, possibly the worst thing you can say is good night. I think that if you say and night, it just feels like you're going to go home and just go to sleep and your day is basically over and you spent

it just work. But if you say something like have a good night, you can sort of acknowledge that you're going to go do something fun after work, or even if you're just gonna go home and watch TV, you at least have some time to do what you wanted to. So I love to hear your thoughts. We love the podcast. Wow the power of two words. Yeah. So was she

saying half have a good night is? Okay? Yes? But good night, good night, good night does sound like you're saying good night, yeah, good night to go to sleep. But I do like, yeah, it's like I have a life outside of work, let me have it. Yeah, good night. It does sound kind of sad, like this is the last thing you're going to do today. You worked and now you go to sleep. Yeah. I'm really into this hat big takes, So thank you Emily. Francesca. What's your

not super liformed idea. Okay, I know I I've done a lot of half big takes about various days of the week, and I know I've actually also done a half big take about Mondays. But I have another one about Mondays. Lean into it. You know, I'm the day of the week girl. Um, Monday's Okay, this will be the click baity headline. It's not really true, but Mondays are the best day of the week. It's the click

it's the counterintuitive with sound of meat clicking on it. Okay, they're not really the best day of the week, but they are by far not the worst. And in fact, Mondays are kind of cool. I kind of like Mondays. So Sundays are horrible. We all know this, and you spend them dreading Monday and going back to work. But once you get up and start your day on Monday, first of all, you're already in the week, so you

don't have anything to dread. And then you get to work and like usually there's a lot of work to do, Like, there's a lot of stuff to get through, so it keeps you busy. The day kind of flies by, and also like you get to see your work people again and it's nice to be around people and have a reason to like to, you know, take a shower. I had this experience this morning, like you really read my mind. I just I woke up and was ready. I was

just like, Okay, we're here, We're doing it. It's kind of the same feeling I have when I'm really anxious about anything like surgery or going on a roller coaster, get very anxious, like the Sunday Scaries, and then you're on it and you're like, Okay, we're in it. We're just going to deal with what we have, and you have the most energy. This is bordering a little close to therapy, but that's a really good lesson, is that the thing that you do is never going to be

as bad as worrying about. Wow, I love it, Becca. What is your deeply insightful but not fully formed insight. It's a kind of a response to another half bag take we had. A caller said she really didn't like when people asked her about her weekend, and so I have kind of my half bay take about how you should deal with that. Okay, you can't really say like, oh, how is your weekend? You can't say like good, you can't just answer it with one word you have to.

I think the best way to shut it down is to answer with one big thing that you did, or if it's like what do you to this one big thing you're going to do. So it's not like nobody wants to have a whole conversation about your life. Pick one, Just pick one thing, like I'm going to the beach, right, so everyone's satisfied. Yeah, what what if you didn't do anything?

Because I feel like they're the code word for that is very relaxing, or like I just edged out it was really chill, and that means you straight up watch TV a weekend. Just say like, so I ordered in and watched them Netflix. Yeah, or in your theory, if you're picking one thing, it could be like you just pick the best Netflix watched and you're like, I watched episode three of Game of Throne season four, and this is exactly what it was about. Because I think people

are just craving a little conversation. I don't really care about your life, so just give them a little nibble, pick one thing, move it along. I love it. And this has been half bag takes, half baked takes. Thanks for listening to another episode of Game Plan. You can find me on Twitter at rs Greenfield and I'm at Francesca today. You can tweet your half bag, takes at us, or any other thoughts you have. You can also call us and leave a voicemail at two to six zero one.

If you want to hear from us more. Sign up for our newsletter. You can find it at bloomberg dot com slash Newsletters. If you like our show, please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, subscribe, rate, and review us. Every review helps more people find out about our podcast. The show was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. The Head of Podcasts is Alec McCabe and we'll see you next week. Bye.