Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer has decided to take “office perks” to the next level by introducing an on-site medical centre, pharmacist, fitness centre and more – including goats to graze the lawns.
Mayer has been adding new elements to the list of company perks since she first took on the top job in 2012, but her announcement of the new Yahoo Wellness Centre is the most comprehensive perks package yet.
The Wellness Centre opened last week on site at the company’s Sunnyvale offices in conjunction with a team of medical professionals. With the medical centre now located in the office, employees can now see a primary health care doctor during working hours – and it’s completely free. They can also pick up prescription medications they need and get pathological test, like blood tests, done at any time.
Mayer has also arranged for Yahoo to host “wellness days” that encourage employees to take advantage of the services available to boost their wellbeing and work/life balance.
The tech company also has a dental van that visits the office when required by employees.
The Wellness Centre joins a long list of office perks at the California company – employees are offered free breakfast, lunch and dinner each day from the office’s large cafeteria, sushi bar and crowd-sourced juice bar.
Along with the Wellness Centre, the company also provides its employees with a free Fitness Centre, which includes gym equipment as well as free massages, saunas and exercise classes. Mayer organised an expansion of the centre when she was appointed CEO.
And it doesn’t end there – soon the company will also have a large ergonomics lab to ensure employees are not risking their health in the office. The office has a TV studio on site where employees can play in Fantasy Football tournaments and get paid visits by stars of Yahoo’s TV shows. New employees also get $75 to spend at the company’s gift shop. Employees also get free shuttle services to and from San Francisco each day to help them with their journey to work.
And then there’s the goats. Goats are brought in to tend to the grasssurrounding the offices. I’m not sure if you would describe this as an office “perk” but it sure is something.
It seems these extravagant perks are making their way to Australia, too.
San Francisco startup Eventbrite has recently opened an office in Sydney that offers similar services to its employees. Eventbrite workers who drive to the office are given petrol money as well as parking money, and workers who take public transport are reimbursed for their expenditure.
Employees also get flown to San Francisco shortly after starting with the company and get an all-expenses paid holiday to the Northern California city.
Eventbrite also has a “wellness program”, which covers the cost of employees’ gym memberships, acupuncture, massages – even juices and facials.
Employees also get taken on an off-site holiday once every few months, get free food and alcohol in the office once a week and get taken out to dinner and drinks regularly as part of the startup’s “social club”.
“It’s about a strong work/life balance, we want people to relax. The work is challenging but we want people to relax,” Elsita Meyer-Brandt, the company’s head of new market expansion and international marketing said.
Marketing companies in Australia are doing the same – Filtered Media has recently introduced “Marilyn Monro days”, which provide each worker with one day’s leave to celebrate their birthday. The company has also introduced “yolo days”, which give employees two paid days leave each year for when they don’t feel like going to work.
“The Yolo Days are not to be planned in advance, they are days when you wake up and just don’t feel like facing the world,” said one employee.
“Or a day when the sun is shining so brightly you must be out in it.”
So it seems these excessive office perks are something of a trend – but how useful are they?
The majority of chief executives implementing these perks say their goal is to increase employees’ work/life balance – but are on-site massages really the way to do that? Are goats?
To me, none of these things seem to add much in the way of real, sustainable work/life balance, which is about being able to effectively manage the competing demands of work and home life on employees, and particularly on women.
The reason businesses still struggle to retain women is not that they are unhappy about not getting a day off to celebrate their birthday, or because they feel deprived when they have to be in the office instead of the beach on a sunny Sydney day. It’s because women still face persistent structural barriers at work that prevent them from being able to balance working life with the disproportionate amount of unpaid work they still undertake at home.
Breaking down these barriers needs to be the number one goal of any attempt to increase work/life balance.
To break down these barriers and implement real work/life balance, we need a few simple things. We need a real commitment to flexible work – which doesn’t mean allowing women two “yolo days” per year, it means actually understanding and accommodating the flexibility new mothers need when returning to work. We need affordable, high quality childcare – on-site acupuncture is useless if we don’t have the structure in place that allows women to get to the office in the first place. Without these things, we will never make progress towards the kind of work/life balance that allows women to enter the workforce, stay in the workforce andremain engaged with it over the course of a long, fulfilled career.
Office medical care, juice bars and free food are great for the work/life balance of employees who are able to get to the office each morning, but they do very little for those who can’t – and to be honest I still can’t see any benefit whatsoever of the goats, but hey, maybe I’m missing something.
What do you think? Would these office perks convince you to join or stay in a company?