Why office perks fail to retain employees

We have moved into a new era of employee benefits. While traditional employee benefits such as healthcare, PTO, and retirement matching are expected, perks like onsite free food, gyms, and massages are becoming increasingly attractive to job seekers.

It’s typical of emerging startups to use these perks to entice competitive talent to join their organisation, with companies like Google offering an entire campus of free cafés, haircuts, and other extravagancies.

But while these perks seem to be appealing to fresh young talent, are they actually proving a real return on investment?

Google has been number one on the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work for four years running. As mentioned, their Googleplex campus offers everything from free food, to haircuts, to fully equipped gyms with swim-in-place pools, to daycare and more. In the last decade, Google has grown from 2,000 to over 53,000 employees – and become one of the most recognised brands in the world.

People want to work there
On the flipside, there are successful companies that haven’t jumped on board when it comes to offering excessive employee perks. Amazon, for example, has notably made headlines for their harsh work environment and treatment of employees’ work-life balance.

Amazon’s chairman, president and CEO even went on record in an interview, poking fun at the current popularity of offering employee perks and amenities. Employees at Amazon pay for their own lunch and have famously low salaries. And still, Amazon continues to grow. With 150,000 employees, people want to work there, too.

What these two very different companies have in common is this: they both make the least loyal employees list for having incredibly high turnover. And while it seems unpredictable that Google, the most recognised and best place to work according to Forbes, would have as high of an employee turnover as Amazon, they are neck and neck at an average employee tenure of about one year.

Replacing employees is incredibly expensive. In fact, organisations can expect to spend 30% to 50% of an entry level employee’s salary just to replace and onboard, 150% of mid-level employees salary, and around 400% for highly specialized employees.

It takes significant manpower and resources to onboard and train new employees. So, when you look at a company like Google with 53,000 employees and a one-year average tenure, you see millions of dollars being drained away in onboarding, hiring, training, and salaries.

It’s clear that employee perks bring people in. But they aren’t making them stay. If Google can’t retain employees while offering extravagant perks, what principles can a company implement as a foundation to keep great employees?

Define, promote, and uphold your company culture
The term company culture is thrown around quite a bit but is often misrepresented. Company culture is a combination of behaviours, beliefs, and values that are accepted across an organisation. The biggest misconception when it comes to company culture is that employees create it, and therefore hiring the “right” people will, in turn, create a company culture of great work.

The simple truth is this: company culture isn’t something employees bring to your organisation. It is a pre-existing belief system that is reinforced by your employees. Too often, organisations will boast of their impressive company culture, but in reality day-to-day morale and employee actions portray a completely different set of values.

Your employees will uphold whatever company culture you’ve put in place. Define and promote your company values and then practise what you preach on a daily basis.

Create buy-in with management and leadership
We’ve all heard that “people don’t leave their jobs, they leave their managers”. But sometimes people just leave their jobs for better jobs.

However, the point remains: in majority of situations, managers have not provided any opportunity for career growth or development, and the employee feels pigeonholed in their current position. No amount of free haircuts or swimming pools will retain people who consider themselves at a dead end.

Get your managers to buy-in to their leadership roles through trainings that help them learn how to welcome, engage, and increase loyalty throughout your organisation. Help them develop the skills they need to create a space of trust with each of their direct reports.

When leaders learn how to engage with employees so they don’t get to a point where they feel stuck in their current position, employee satisfaction and loyalty will increase tenfold. If your managers and leaders buy-in and are invested in your company goals, your employees will follow suit. Great leadership makes the difference.

Invest in the right employees
One of Google’s eight ideas that work at Google is to “hire the right people”. Google is obviously on to something, but it’s not enough to simply hire the right people – you want to keep the right people. To keep great employees, you have to know what they want. Study after study has shown that employees want to be valued and know that they are making a difference.

There are many ways to invest in the right employees. The simplest and yet sometimes hardest investment is to make time for, and take personal interest in, employees’ career growth. Most employers will insist they can’t afford the time it takes to invest in individual employees. But when you refer to the statistics on employee turnover, how can you afford to not invest in the most crucial aspect of employee retention?

Schedule one-on-one time specifically to discuss what is working well and where there are areas to grow. Allow interested employees to develop and learn at trainings, seminars, forums, etc. These types of learnings will not only be a valuable return on investment for your organization; employees will feel like they are important to your organisation.

The article originally appeared on O.C. Tanner