Employee benefit trends – lessons from Recruitty
Ruslan Khalilov, Managing Director at Recruitty.
Salary, holiday allowance, company culture, management style—there’s a long list of factors that attract new recruits to your company. Knowing what’s important to prospective workers is central to any good hiring strategy, and helps with retaining your current employees. Employee perks play an essential role in helping candidates to decide between companies.
We had a chat with Ruslan Khalilov, a man with his finger on the pulse of the latest employee benefit trends (you guessed it—plants are one of these). Ruslan was integral to hiring in the product and engineering teams at N26 during their hyper-growth period. Now he is the co-founder and Managing Director of Recruitty, an agency that matches startups across Europe with the top talent in software engineering.
Popular Employee Perks
As hiring becomes more competitive, workplace perks can give your company an edge. Startups are trying to replicate the company benefits offered by tech giants like Google. “I’ve been to the Zurich Google office, and they have so many perks,” said Ruslan.
“Each startup in Berlin is duplicating what Google did ten years ago.”
So what are the work benefits employees are after? Ruslan told us—after salary and contract type—the most common question from their talents was “if it is possible to work remotely. This right now is a very trendy question amongst the candidates.”
In Germany, 39% of businesses allow their employees to work from home. Flexible working practices are regularly cited as one of the top company benefits workers are looking for. Trends in employee benefits come and go—but with the outbreak of covid-19, it looks like remote working is here to stay.
Another trend Ruslan mentioned was the change to health-enhancing benefits. Employees want perks focused on health and wellbeing, like gym memberships or healthy snacks rather than sweets. “Instead of just having Coca Cola, Sprite, chocolate, [companies] give fruit baskets, or some kind of juice, or nuts.”
Company Benefits in Different Countries
Recruitty works with companies across Europe. We wanted to know if the top employee benefits were the same in Spain as in Berlin or Munich. It turns out workplace benefits and employee expectations vary between locations.
While salaries are lower in Spain, workers are given a daily meal allowance to cover their lunches—a rare treat in Germany. “I remember at N26 they had this Wednesday brown paper bag lunch, and this was very cool and different. But in Spain and in Portugal, it’s a very very common thing to have free lunches.”
Company-wide trips are another expectation at Spanish companies: “once a year they travel somewhere for some kind of offsite—not just a small team but the whole company. I have rarely seen something like that in German startups.” Taking inspiration from other countries and offering less common perks can help your company stand out from the crowd.
Challenges and Changes to Hiring Practices
New talents want to visit the office, check out the neighborhood, and imagine themselves in the space. But hiring practices have had to change since the outbreak of covid-19. Now recruitment is taking place remotely, we wanted to know how Recruitty gives candidates a feel for a company’s office environment.
“Some companies really put a lot of effort into PDFs or videos of the office to give this feeling. Some companies say when the Corona situation is finished we'll invite you to the office... From our side we just try to describe it, because every time we have an intake call with a client we ask them to show what’s going on, we go to the office, so we know how it looks. But it's not the same.”
Social distancing measures also pose challenges for companies—Ruslan said clients can struggle to decide between candidates they don’t meet in person. Then there were issues with welcoming new recruits: “I was very surprised that even startups in Berlin, who are accustomed to interviewing remotely, still don’t know how to onboard someone remotely. They really struggle with that… If borders all around the world are going to be closed for longer, we’ll have no choice but to go remote, more and more.”
After Corona: What Works in the Workplace?
With lockdown restrictions lifting across Europe and people heading back to the office, we wondered how working practices will change. Now people are used to the perks of home office, will employers have to try harder to attract top talents?
Like others, Ruslan is happy working from home where he can enjoy his backyard.
“I really like to work near the plants. I like to be near the green area... If you can have an office with a lot of plants, that would be a really cool differentiator from other places.”
Companies who provide perks such as plants in the workplace “invest heavily in their office space, and you feel the difference… At other startups in Berlin it’s cool, it’s nice, but it doesn’t feel like home. It feels like some kind of factory. At some point you become tired of that. You don’t feel very comfortable. In offices with a lot of plants… It feels very different. It feels like home.”
Employee benefit trends change with the times: 10 years ago workers wouldn’t bring their dogs to the office, but now this is an expected perk. Ruslan feels it is the same with plants—that green offices will become essential to a comprehensive package of workplace benefits.
Plantclub.io provides you and your colleagues with the benefits of plants, wherever you work. Rent office plants and transform your space into a green oasis, with flexible monthly membership options to suit your size. Diversify your employee perks with a dedicated company store, where you can give green gifts and your team can buy plants for their home office. Book a time to chat with us today.