{"id":102631,"date":"2020-11-01T19:24:25","date_gmt":"2020-11-01T16:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/todays-employee-perks-lunch-stipends-and-virtual-child-care\/"},"modified":"2020-11-01T19:24:25","modified_gmt":"2020-11-01T16:24:25","slug":"todays-employee-perks-lunch-stipends-and-virtual-child-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/todays-employee-perks-lunch-stipends-and-virtual-child-care\/","title":{"rendered":"#Today\u2019s employee perks? Lunch stipends and virtual child care"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Today\u2019s employee perks? Lunch stipends and virtual child care<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n
\"Andrew
Andrew Matsumoto<\/span>Alexander Scott Harris<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Working at home, alone in his Brooklyn apartment, was not what Andrew Matsumoto signed up for. The 33-year-old product designer had just started his job at mortgage lender Better.com<\/a> when the pandemic hit and he was sent to work from home.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was unsettling,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Matsumoto missed out on spending time with his new co-workers while brainstorming on the office\u2019s cozy couches, grabbing fresh fruit, chips and other snacks, and chatting over lunch. With 5,000 employees at the company\u2019s World Trade Center headquarters, there were plenty of people to meet and spend time with.<\/p>\n

Matsumoto was hardly the only one who felt this way. \u201cOur first survey [after the pandemic began] showed that employees felt disconnected,\u201d said Arthur Matuszewski, vice president of talent at the company.<\/p>\n

Better.com\u2019s CEO Vishal Garg has an edict of maintaining a thriving company culture and doing right by people. That left Matuszewski and his team scrambling to provide workers with everything they had at the office at home. That translated to stipends for things like stand-up desks, lunches and dinners and delivering team-building activities such as virtual talent shows and singalongs. The company also created Better Birds, a virtual day care program that entertains kids with activities and game<\/a>s until 8 p.m.<\/p>\n

Sound like a bit much? Not according to the experts.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking at home, away from your office and co-workers isn\u2019t natural,\u201d workplace expert and author Mark C. Crowley told the New York Post. \u201cWorkers need to feel employers saying, \u2018I care about you.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

Lorraine Hack, a headhunter at Midtown executive search firm Korn Ferry<\/a> agreed, noting that continuously showing app<\/a>reciation and empathy for your employees proactively is critical. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to start doing this as people are leaving,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

This wisdom isn\u2019t lost on Lauren Sobel, vice president of human resources at PuppySpot.com<\/a>, a service that helps responsible breeders place their puppies with caring individuals and families. Sobel, often referred to as the company Santa, sends surprise gifts to the Jersey City, NJ-based company\u2019s team of at-home workers.<\/p>\n

Alisha Randy, a 35-year-old Jersey City resident, is PuppySpot.com\u2019s recruiting manager. She recalls receiving her first surprise. \u201cThe doorbell rang, and a pizza no one had ordered arrived at the door,\u201d she said. At about the same time, messages from her co-workers kept popping up on her screen: \u201cI just got a pizza,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

The event \u201creally brought the amazing office culture and vibes right into our homes, and was such a great surprise,\u201d said Randy. \u201cIt was awesome to see that we were all able to come together during this unprecedented time and really flourish as a company overall.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Cinco de Mayo, PuppySpotters received deliveries of salsa and chips. More recently they shipped out baseball caps with the company logo on them. Randy has also joined in a company-sponsored, home-based Paint and Sip, where canvases, paint and brushes were sent to participants in advance. An instructor then virtually taught them how to paint corgis.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt had to be a puppy, of course,\u201d said Randy.<\/p>\n

Crowley gives high marks to employers who are keeping workers engaged in this way.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are lonely as hell,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve spent the past seven months seeing no one but their spouse and their family.\u201d He added that meetings on Zoom don\u2019t help people make meaningful connections in the way that shared experiences and having fun do.<\/p>\n

Feather<\/a>, a subscription furniture provider based in Soho, said that it would allow employees to work from anywhere to \u201cremove the burden of wondering when we\u2019d start working from the office again,\u201d said Zach Ragland, head of people at the startup.<\/p>\n

They brought out $100 monthly lunch stipends to replace the three catered office lunches that Feather employees enjoyed. Plus, each week, the company uses a service called Donut, which randomly pairs three employees together for meals or chats.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea is to replace the water-cooler experience they would have had in the office,\u201d said Ragland. Feather has also created a virtual \u201csafe room,\u201d where workers can gather for unmonitored, off-the-record conversations. Feather also offers 30-minute virtual fitness classes four times per week, which include meditation, cardio, strength training and yoga.<\/p>\n

Even so, Feather has employees who crave to go back to the office, so the company opened its doors to them \u201cfor now,\u201d said Ragland.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s something that part of Better.com\u2019s workforce would also like to do. \u201cWe\u2019re beginning to feel the pressure,\u201d said Matuszewski.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, employers need to do all that they can to show their workers, \u201cI\u2019m thinking of you,\u201d said Crowley. \u201cThe heart plays a greater part in the employer\/employee relationship than we think.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Today\u2019s employee perks? Lunch stipends and virtual child care” Andrew MatsumotoAlexander Scott Harris Working at home, alone in his Brooklyn apartment, was not what Andrew Matsumoto signed up for. The 33-year-old product designer had just started his job at mortgage lender Better.com when the pandemic hit and he was sent to work from home. \u201cIt…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":102632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/10\/virtual-child-care.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[78007,71736,72212,71914],"class_list":["post-102631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-11-1-20","tag-at-work","tag-benefits","tag-careers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}