With firms looking to cut costs in a high-inflation panorama, a bevy of employee perks that noticed an increase throughout the hypercompetitive post-pandemic job market is on the chopping block, together with tuition help, charitable present matching, and even dental insurance coverage.
Nonetheless, there’s one profit that is still untouched—and it’s to do with maintaining dad and mom comfortable.
That’s the takeaway from a Glassdoor analysis of 2024 office developments, which reveals a shifting panorama in a few of the hottest advantages of the previous few years.
Take mobile-phone reductions, which have been accessible at a majority of employers six years in the past, based on Glassdoor’s evaluation of worker evaluations. As of 2023, these reductions have fallen off a cliff, Glassdoor reveals.
Commuter assistance, which peaked in 2020, has since fallen to its pre-pandemic degree, and gymnasium memberships, which have been all the fad amongst tech sector employers in 2019, have fallen almost to zero.
“With the corporate austerity over the past year, benefits that were less used during the pandemic are coming under scrutiny,” Glassdoor Chief Economist Aaron Terrazas advised Fortune.
“Wages rarely, almost never, adjust down, so when times are difficult and companies try to save on compensation costs, they often look at benefits,” Terrazas added.
The provision of 401(ok) plans, dental insurance coverage, and tuition help have all fallen from 2021, throughout all forms of employers, the evaluate reveals, whereas imaginative and prescient plan availability has stayed flat.
(The evaluate didn’t tackle the supply of medical insurance coverage, which surveys show stays among the many most crucial advantages staff need.)
Extra firms supply fertility, adoption, or depart advantages
Even among the many panorama of cost-cutting, although, advantages that target household — together with adoption or fertility help and parental depart—have grown sharply, together with because the pandemic.
“There is a trend of more family-focused benefits,” Terrazas mentioned.
Adoption help went from nonexistent in 2017 to showing in a few quarter of employer evaluations this 12 months; amongst monetary providers employers, the profit is almost ubiquitous, Glasdoor’s evaluation reveals. Fertility help and parental depart rose from negligible in 2017 to showing in half of evaluations in 2023 (and almost common amongst monetary providers and tech employers).
There are two overlapping causes for this, based on Glassdoor. The most important generation in the workplace—the millennials—are actually of their 30s, the height years for youngster elevating. Their ageing into parenthood coincided with the pandemic-era push to keep working parents on the job, the place employers rolled out a slate of formal and casual perks to make it easier to work amid household responsibilities—from parental depart to flexible work schedules.
With a concerted push to bring workers back to the office (a minimum of a few of the time), and white-collar employees generally having fun with much less soft phrases than that they had in the previous few years, the family-friendly pattern may simply reverse, Terrazas famous. However one think about its favor is that parental profit insurance policies will be surprisingly low-cost for the employer, he mentioned.
“Something like fertility assistance is very expensive for the individuals who use it, but only a small portion of the employee population uses it—compared to the lower per-employee cost of the mobile phone discount that maybe every employee uses,” he mentioned.
