I agree - free guide dogs for everyone. The blind have had it too easy for too long.
A perk of the job, that, is it?
Free tea and coffee (instant)
A company I worked at many years ago had a Maxpax (remember those?) coffee machine, it was dreadful, but common in the 80s/90s.
It was 12p or something for a drink, which was too much. What made it worse was we, the mobile service guys would have to pay and the office staff were allowed to use the money we’d put in to ‘buy’ their hot crappy drink.
Apparently, when I pointed out to my boss it’s taking the piss, it was a perk for the office staff as we’d tend to get a free coffee/tea when visiting clients.
Apparently the coffee machine needed some money in it ‘for tax reasons’.
Self employed since age 19. 43 now and semi retired.
Zero employer benefits
As convert has already pointed out, this is self evidently bollocks.
I get lots of little things
Loads of free event tickets to.- Horse Racing, Festival of Speed , Revival , GRRC Members meetings , gym memebrship , discounted golf club memebership ,free gym- sauna- pool, discounted hotel rooms, discounted food and drink at 6 or so locations, several xmas events, discounted flying lessons, discounted car finance , health cover , life insurance 4x salary , medical checks , annual performance related bonus . Basic pension contributions though.
NHS - decent pension contributions, decent holidays after long service, salary sacrifice, and that’s about it
30yrs work experience I’d take a good culture as a perk any day over any other ‘perk’
A pound for every commute thats sustainable. I enjoy poking holes in this one.
Our pension contributions are matched up to 10percents
Healthcare stuff
Employee Ownership bonus
Profit share
Electric car and bike to work
And the latest addition is 750quid a year with various options how to spend.
- Pop it pension and we get a little extra contribution on top of that.
-Sports club and gym membership
-Electric car contibution
-Etc.
Its probably the best in terms of its a perk that you can fit to your own needs.
This thread is back to front though...
Instead of what do you get as a work benefit it really should be . " Which workplace benefits are a good reason to start working somewhere else , or make staying where you are more bearable"
How does the buying holiday days thing work, is it just a case of giving up the salary you would have gotten for those days?
Ours comes off as salary sacrifice, across 12 months. I've been doing it so long I don't miss the money as I've never really had it.
Ive never understood how this is a perk. When I’m on a/l my work just sits there waiting for me to come back. If I buy an extra week off I get paid less but still end up having to do the work I would have done whilst away.
I can see the benefit if your work gets done by others whilst your away such as nursing, manufacturing lines etc
Sounds like you either need to do a better handover or manage your outstanding workload better.
The answer to "if I don't do it, it doesn't get done" is "well it doesn't get done, then."
Sounds like you either need to do a better handover or manage your outstanding workload better.
There is no one to hand it over to. I am a single point of failure, but only lip service is paid to someone else backing me up even when they rang me on holiday as they were stuck. Even if I could history says it doesn’t get done.
Can’t you all just go to work and be happy you get paid for it like most working people? Sounds like most of you work in the warmth and dry with very little risk to your health except scalding your lip.
What gives you that impression? I work outside all year, all night when it’s required, work at height, confined spaces underground, work in the highway, and through Covid as key worker. I like the job, but the perks are not great apart from the compressed hours I enjoy (but that’s only as it means we have to work a Saturday rotation on most other departments) The paternity thing is probably the biggest notable perk but not if you’ve already had your family or not planning on one…
Self employed since age 19. 43 now and semi retired.
24 year career and now semi retired? Obviously there are drawbacks with self employment as you’ve stated, but you’ve obviously done well for yourself, I think many on this thread would be happy to trade their perks to be in your position with your earning potential. And there are perks to self employment, choose your hours, holiday, what you business expenses, where you work, whether you are allowed Christmas off this year (please boss) perhaps even a little self awarded career break (HR says no) We are the same age, I have no doubt I’ll be working into my late 60’s.
After years working for companies that had decent benefits (18% employer pension contributions, buy-1-get-3 share plans, private healthcare, gym membership, etc.) but shitty working conditions, I'm now employed by a company that provides very few benefits indeed (I get $123 to put towards private healthcare, that's it) and it's night and day. They pay better than most but the scales rebalance somewhat once I've sorted my own pension, healthcare, gym membership, travel costs, etc. out. The company itself is superb though, they honestly can't do enough to make sure we're happy at work. I'd stay here until retirement if they'll have me that long. As FunkyDunc says above - work culture trumps work benefits every day of the week.
If my employer was asking, I'd be requesting the ability to buy more days of holiday (I have a friend that can buy up to 30 days, which is the dream if I could afford it!) That and to have less shit chairs
Social care worker here, there's a difficult to use bike to work scheme otherwise nothing
Likewise, purchasing more holiday and flexitime would always be up there.
Standard arrangements here are 17.5% annual leave loading - you actually get paid more when you're not at work!
Salary sacrifice arrangements that put about $4k extra in my pocket each year.
1 day off every 4 weeks on top of standard leave
10 years service and you get 12 weeks long service leave at full pay
We have good range of standard benefits (all already listed on various other replies). Apart from that they did recently install a free chocolate, crisps, fizzy drinks facility - I'm in two minds about it though, it's not exactly encouraging healthy eating (although they do have a fruit basket delivered a couple of times a week to), but it's also free chocolate... It includes a range of breakfast cereals which can be quite handy and apparently we're getting toasters and bread/butter/jam soon (already have good coffee & tea facilities) but I suspect it will be rubbish cheap bread but I can just bring my own in I guess.
I used to work for a big French company. Apart from the perks you might expect like an amazing canteen with oysters and wine, we got free entry to the Louvre, so we could bypass the queue and dip in to see something that grabbed our interest without feeling we had to see every single artwork in the history of humanity. No comparison with the sex shower, but nice.
A reasonable but eroded pension scheme, salary sacrifice car buying thing and 25% off council gyms that are always shut.
Not even allowed a kettle in my room (not even the pat tested one I bought myself).
getting toasters and bread/butter/jam soon
That will last until the first burnt toast clears the building due to a false alarm by the smoke detector in the kitchen. (Top tip replace smoke alarms in kitchens with heat detectors appropriately sited).
Free tea and coffee (instant)
A company I worked at many years ago had a Maxpax (remember those?) coffee machine, it was dreadful, but common in the 80s/90s.
It was 12p or something for a drink, which was too much. What made it worse was we, the mobile service guys would have to pay and the office staff were allowed to use the money we’d put in to ‘buy’ their hot crappy drink.
Apparently, when I pointed out to my boss it’s taking the piss, it was a perk for the office staff as we’d tend to get a free coffee/tea when visiting clients.
Apparently the coffee machine needed some money in it ‘for tax reasons’.
My 'year in industry' during my degree was at an Automotive manufacturer who had a large dept doing laser cutting. One of my first tasks as the Student engineer (as it was each year) was to design (Autocad, 2D), plan, and then follow through production, a large sheet (2.4metre?) of sheet steel which was laser cut into 'coins' that would work in the 'Klix' hot drink vendor. I then walked round all the production stations, welding shop, trim shop, final assembly, QA etc introducing myself and hanging out 'free drinks tokens' !
You could get Coffee, White Coffee (Coffee with white dust in), Hot chocolate, Tea, or Tomato Soup!
It must have worked becuase I ended going back and working there for a decade. The Klix machine was long gone though!
Klix machines were both the bane and the saviour of my time as a highways inspector. Yes, the coffee and tea were brown water nearly indistinquisable from each other, but NOTHING came close to how welcome they were when you'd been out doing a walked survey and you saw one of them in a break room.
You could get Coffee, White Coffee (Coffee with white dust in), Hot chocolate, Tea, or Tomato Soup!
My first couple of call centre / data entry jobs had those. Rubbish things. But when you don't have a kitchen...
A few years later I worked for Zen Internet, whose CEO worried about all the pasty faced nerds in his company living on pizza and Dr Pepper, so first bought an orange juicing machine with regular deliveries of oranges (I bloody loved that thing), then built a nice new HQ with a kitchen and professional chef to provide good meals at subsidised prices. Sadly I didn't work at HQ. As I understand it, the pasty faced nerds had no interest in sea bream with leeks and beans or whatever, and the chef spent most of his time cooking chips and beans...
BT and 3Com had a similar thing back in the day. Big staff canteen, choices of food, most of which were something with chips.
The biggest con I see now is coffee machines. Much talk about how the beans are selected and the machines can make everything from a latte to snutkaffe, but all ignore the fact that good beans only gets you so far with a machine that is cleaned once a week and that uses UHT milk or powder for the other drinks.
Result: You could feed the machine with civett-poop beans and it will still taste like acidic cheap instant with Tipp-Ex.
Microsoft, for all its sins, has the right idea. You visit their office in Stockholm, you get Boris the Barista making you a coffee and he's good.
3 months off at full pay after 10 years service.
I took 6 months off at half pay and had a wonderful trip round Europe with the family.
6 more years and same again (although we're in process of refinancing mortgage and I think we only have 5 years left) which works out nice!
I did receive:
Good holiday entitlement.
Physio treatment
Car and electronic scheme
Good sick pay
Pension matched I did pay a lot in but I receive a good pension back
a few other perks too.
That and to have less shit chairs
You want the space for more urinals?
That will last until the first burnt toast clears the building due to a false alarm by the smoke detector in the kitchen. (Top tip replace smoke alarms in kitchens with heat detectors appropriately sited).
We have toasters, and panini press type thing. In the suggestion box last week someone requested an air fryer. That got a swift "NO!"
getting toasters and bread/butter/jam soon
That will last until the first burnt toast clears the building due to a false alarm by the smoke detector in the kitchen. (Top tip replace smoke alarms in kitchens with heat detectors appropriately sited).
Can confirm. We had a toaster that we used responsibly, then one of the other offices in the building burnt some toast, strong email from building management re terms of leases etc. 2 months later another fire alarm. Same reason, different company. They aren’t in this building anymore.
The George Foreman grill we had at the old office in the UK got used to within an inch of it's life. Hell, we had a Dualit toaster that got used so much that it needed a service. The running joke was that you could tell when the uni students arrived to work experience because the bread and cheese useage would double.
Mind you, that microwave... It was a catering unit with no rotating platter, so microwaving a lasagne got you burnt bits and uncooked bits at the same time.
Then we moved offices to somewhere waaaaay more expensive and they took away the bread and cheese.
RBS who got bailed out with 45 billion from the government in 2008 yet 3 years earlier built Gogarburn in Edinburgh with a 20m pool amongst many other perks for their staff, big advertising at every gran prix circuit they were splashing the cash
It still gets used probably free for NAT west staff now
40 days holiday, cheap car (it's about 50% discounted over what i'd pay as a customer), 500 a year for sports and fitness. Pays for my zwift and 30 some hours of badminton. about 850 quid for my 50th. 400 ish days leave per child (state pays most, company tops up.) to take before they are 12. The company benefits scheme gives discounts on pretty much anything you can imagine, from painters and decorators to sunglasses and package holidays, some of the discounts are worth having (50% off at one of the major sports mail order places last year) some aren't (5% off overpriced and crappy kitchen stuff). Cheap gym on site. Free creche on site during holidays (when the normal state provided ones are closed.) Usually empty due to the aforementioned 40 days holiday. Share matching on occasion (it's a yearly thing, was cancelled last year and isn't looking likely this year either). 3/2 hybrid working with an official blind eye turned to working more from home. Free coffee (revolting muck as far as i'm concerned)
I have free unlimited colour photocopy privileges and free choice of parking, as long as get to work before everyone else. I also have a private office with two desks and two swivel chairs so I can pretend I'm two different people having a chair race around the office when I get bored. Unfortunately, my department is closing at the end of March due to profitability stuff that the accountants keep nagging about so I have to vacate the premises, but I have a budget of about £500 that I need to use or lose, but anything over £50 has to be registered and returned when I leave but anything under that is considered consumable so if anyone wants a good deal on USB cables or mouse pads, message me.
I get an employee morgage deal. Which despite being taxed as a benefit in kind still saved me a few quid. That was until interest rates jumped up, and whilst all my buddies were unaffected on a fixed deal, I ended up paying a crippling amount more as it tracked the base rate.
Now it's no longer seen as much of a perk...
We have a Lavazza coffee machine with sachet powder drinks. However there's a regular coffee can that does rounds of various offices and he does us all a hefty discount cos we all use him every time he's here.
Most of the instant coffee machines, even if they do use beans, are quite shit, they'll fall apart without proper daily cleaning.
Perks? As a support worker working with Adults with learning disabilities, I may occasionally find a rubber glove in my pocket when I get home… winner!!
Also, city centre offices a short walk from a main line train station is definitely better than being on a business park miles away from anything
Leave purchase
Free wine
Discounted groceries
Discounted booze
more free wine… have to be careful with that…
I work for a company that is owned by VC's they have recently completed the acquisitions phase / 'growth' period ready to set the business up for sale. I was part of the acquired bits almost 2 years ago.
We have no HR, no payroll, no employee handbook nothing. We have a UK 'director' who employees 7 people including himself. 2 people work in an office the rest remote. Directorman does everything from putting new lightbulbs up in the office to paying the wages at the bank each month (we are pretty sure there is a lot of dubious activities going on) sometimes he remembers to pay me on time, some times.
So work perks.....I can salary sacrifice any bonus into my pension. Unofficial work perks, because directorman takes absolutely no interest in what you are doing I can walk the dog 3 hours a day, I take holidays in the caravan anytime I like providing the location has good wifi or data for my phone, I visit customers based on 3 factors good cycling, good walking, good pub nearby.
Its semi retirement come early and I'm taking their money cos they are all ***** at head office.
Pretty good at our place, similar to many above. My role sees me travelling a bit so I have a Credit Card, can usually pick where I want to stay, I can choose to get a rental car or use my own (even my old bus makes me money at 45ppm), a bit of Euro travel and I've had a few decent trips to California. Generally pretty fair regards travel, go early, stay a bit later etc.
The buy/sell holiday thing is good, I dont bother as I think the amount I have as standard is not too bad.
Sharesave is a big one - we did really well on the last one that matured (doubled your money, basically). Of course the lowering of CGT allowance spoils some of that fun. The key with Sharesave is that its win or draw - you really cannot lose.