Employee benefits: No more free lunch

“The era of ever-expanding workplace perks is ending,” said Tina Reed in Axios. With jobs harder to come by and workers’ negotiating leverage shrinking, “some employers are rolling back” the glowing enticements they started dangling a few years ago. And it’s “not just free kombucha and laundry” that are off the table—policies like “paid parental leave and retirement matches are on the chopping block” as well. Consulting giant Deloitte announced recently it is “reducing paid time off, halving parental leave, and eliminating a $50,000 reimbursement for family-planning services” for most of its employees, said Lauren Goode in Wired, citing the rising costs of keeping such benefits in place. Companies should know, however, that “plenty of research shows that diminishing employees’ quality of life and lowering their total wages” harms the bottom line.

Yet companies seem to feel that “no benefit is off-limits anymore,” said Steve Russolillo in Business Insider. It’s one thing for the “free food, on-site laundry, and gym subsidies” to go, but “I really thought certain benefits like paid time off and parental leave would be untouchable.” Clearly, “I was wrong.” Of course, it’s better to have benefits cut than to lose a job entirely. But the workers who survive downsizing efforts aren’t looking at a future full of perks. The Trump administration, however, wants one specific benefit to be more widely accessible, said Lauren Kaori Gurley in The Washington Post. The Labor Department proposed a new rule to make it easier for employers to offer in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other fertility benefits, and easier for workers to sign up for them. It wouldn’t “eliminate all costs for beneficiaries,” but it could reduce them.

Small businesses should take note of what Deloitte and other corporations are doing, said Suzanne Lucas in Inc. If “you’ve felt like you couldn’t compete with the big companies” as an entrepreneur, now is your chance. “Where you could never match Deloitte’s $50,000 IVF reimbursement or 16 weeks of paid parental leave,” you can offer other attractive perks, like remote work, four-day workweeks, and flexibility. It’s an opportunity to grab top-tier talent that was “out of your reach six months ago.”

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At the same time, some perks were getting out of hand, said Pilita Clark in the Financial Times. The London law firm Slaughter and May, for instance, recently ended a policy from 2022 that allowed workers to bring their pets into the office. Seriously. Other benefits, like fertility procedures, won’t be widely missed—they are used by fewer than 1% of workers, according to benefits platform Heka. Employers are simply “waking up to the fact that what employees say they want differs from what they actually use.”