How will investing in happiness perks improve your team’s productivity? What are the best perks to inspire your team to work at their best?
We’re back with Episode 4 of our new podcast series, Work Happy! We’ll be exploring the landscape of workplace happiness to gain tips on how to move, eat, sleep and work better.
This week, Angelica sat down with co-founder of PerkBox, Chieu Cao, to explore the business benefits of perks for your team.
Perkbox is an employee experience platform which allows workplaces to seamlessly implement perks for their staff. They also have an app which allows you to recognise the efforts of your team virtually with bonus perks and prizes, which is particularly powerful as flexible and remote working becomes the widely accepted norm.
Perkbox offer a variety of perks from, cinema tickets to private medical care but Chieu believes the magic is in the recognition: “It’s a basic human need to be recognised. We talk a lot about financial recognition where you get a bump in satisfaction and it tapers off […] Recognition on an ongoing basis has a much more profound impact on motivation”.
Chieu touches on the generational shift that is forcing managers to rethink previously accepted ways of working, “Millennials make up one third of the workforce […] they believe in having a purpose, a mission […] they believe in themselves […] either you conform or get out the way”.
Though this mindset may be causing a stir in senior management meetings, Chieu believes this understanding of self worth is a great development for our society; “With the transparency of information online […] millennials don’t have that fear of the unknown anymore […] I say understand your worth to the business and be strong about that. Don’t let anyone slow you down”.
The challenge for Perkbox is the management mindset, “for people who don’t believe in our world, it’s really hard to get them to change and adopt it”. Chieu believes getting senior management on side (or middle managers in larger companies) is key to growing employee happiness, “Good management is really important […] people leave managers but join companies”.
At Perkbox, employees have unlimited holiday and flexible working. It works for them because of a “combination of having the right tools and technology and having the right management style”.
He explains that although it’s not for everybody, Perkbox look to empower their staff and treat them like the adults they are, “We hire the best people and trust them […] When you have very like-minded people, it marginalises the non like-minded people”.
Click here to listen to the whole conversation and hear how being employee centric can grow the productivity and profitability of your business.
