How Company Perks and Benefits Have Evolved Since These Teams Went Remote

by Brendan Meyer
September 18, 2020

What’s the point of free in-office lunches, employee gyms and weekly happy hours if you’re stuck working from home?

The COVID-19 pandemic forced most companies to transition to remote work, and in doing so, rendered many of the company perks and benefits that employees once enjoyed useless. That’s why tech employers are now being creative, adapting their perks and benefits for a virtual world.

“While in the office, we had catered lunch and dinners,” Ani Soghomonyan, head of people operations at Sensor Tower, said. “After transitioning to remote working, we now offer all employees $20 a day in delivery credits to order meals of their choice.”

“We’re offering a monthly COVID-19 bonus to provide financial stability and peace of mind to Mironeers,” Hallie Byers, a recruiter at Miro, said.

It doesn’t look like remote work will be leaving anytime soon, so Built In SF caught up with two companies to learn more about how they’ve adapted their perks and benefits in the past six months — from home office stipends to virtual happy hours — that keep their employees happy, healthy and connected.

 

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Hallie Byers
Recruiter • Miro

At tech productivity Miro, company leadership hasn’t missed a beat. They have been hosting virtual wine and paint nights, team trivia and even a murder mystery party.
 

How have you adapted the perks and benefits you offer employees since transitioning to remote work?

We’re offering a monthly COVID-19 bonus to provide financial stability and peace of mind to Mironeers. We usually offer commuter benefits and a daily catered lunch, so this helps to buffer for that transition. We’re also offering a generous reimbursement to new hires so they can deck out their home offices.

What are remote-friendly ways you’re supporting mental health and well-being?

We’ve updated our onboarding to include a virtual product training for all customer-facing roles that set new team members up for success. We have weekly lunch and learns, virtual happy hours and biweekly all-hands meetings where our executive team walks through Miro’s trajectory and we celebrate our wins as a global team.

We’ve launched diversity and inclusion ERGs for team members to lead and join virtually. Our annual all-hands company trip to Russia was held virtually, allowing team members to meet Mironeers around the globe from their living rooms. We had a virtual murder mystery party, trivia, wine and paint night, and a cocktail mixology party.

What role did employee feedback play in shaping these new perks and benefits?

Our executive team sends out a monthly pulse survey to get a read on Mironeer’s mental health and gather feedback about how they can better support us right now. This is analyzed and implemented by our people team. 

 

Ani Soghomonyan
Head of People Operations • Sensor Tower

Many of the new perks at Sensor Tower, a big data company, started out as ideas that came directly from employees. It’s part of the company’s efforts to periodically survey its staff to understand how they can best support remote working.


How have you adapted the perks and benefits you offer employees since transitioning to remote work?

To help employees set up a comfortable home office space, we began offering productivity stipends as well as Wi-Fi reimbursements to help employees set up reliable home networks. We continued to promote team engagement by providing managers with team activity stipends and we started using Donut to allow employees to more casually connect with people on different teams.

In order to be mindful of our increasingly distributed team, we also revamped our onboarding and meeting practices to be more inclusive of employees across different time zones. While in office, we had catered lunch and dinners. So after transitioning to remote working, we now offer all employees $20 a day in delivery credits to order meals of their choice. 

What are remote-friendly ways you’re supporting mental health and well-being?

We’re constantly working to come up with new ways to support mental health and well-being during this period of working remotely. Our health and wellness perks now include access to apps that target mental health, along with a stipend for mental and physical well-being.

We’ve also revamped our benefits to include offerings that have mental health and well-being perks, such as Kaiser Permanente’s ClassPass, Calm subscriptions and Cigna’s mental health offerings. Additionally, we’ve started a variety of monthly virtual sessions for the team, such as yoga, Barry’s Bootcamp classes and meditation sessions.

What role did employee feedback play in shaping these new perks and benefits?

We have been periodically surveying our team to understand what they would like to see Sensor do to support remote working. Much of the feedback included stipends for health and wellness as well as meals. These two specific asks shaped a lot of the offerings that we have incorporated into our remote work programs.

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