It’s More than Pizza Parties

When people talk about employee perks, they usually mean the major benefits like health insurance, 401(k) matches, or paid time off.  In my twenty-plus years in HR, the extras that kept people engaged were more than the benefit packages.  Employees stayed in their jobs longer because of the camaraderie they built, the people they worked with, and the teams they worked on.  Benefit packages are important, but the events that build camaraderie, foster teamwork, and provide ways to collaborate have greater impact.   

Human resources departments are usually the default party planners for employee events. Where I've worked was no different. Company holiday party? HR formed the committee and steered the charge. Bring Your Kids to Work Day? Ditto. Summer picnics, employee awards nights, all of it landed on HR's desk. For a long time, I thought of these events as obligations, just another task to add to my job description. It took me years to realize they were valuable retention tools and I had fun hosting them for employees. 

Take the holiday party. Our planning committee brought together the chef, the catering manager, and the banquet department to plan the menu, the activities, and the gifts. We also learned that stories about the event would fill the next day’s chatter.  Who really let loose on the dance floor, who took full advantage of the open bar, and how the secret office romance came to light compelled us to issue the Code of Conduct the week prior to the Employee Party.

Employee awards night was a different animal entirely. This was the one night a year our employees got to be guests instead of the hosts. Housekeepers, dishwashers, front desk agents, people who spent every other day of the year serving someone else, got to dress up, bring their families, and sit down to a menu the chef designed just for them. We worked with procurement to order the service awards and the Employee of the Year plaque and we kept the winners top secret until the night itself. Watching someone's spouse tear up when their name got called was worth every hour of planning. Gift cards don’t come close to creating that level of joy.

Then there was Bring Your Kids to Work Day, the event nobody forgot, especially me. My HR team worked with each department to invite employees to bring their kids in, a spin on Take Your Daughters to Work Day. These kids worked.  Parents in Housekeeping put their kids to work vacuuming and dusting.  Kitchen employees had their kids mixing batter by hand (nothing with knives or other dangerous equipment, I’m in HR after all).  The maintenance employees, bless them, didn’t have to plunge a single toilet that day because their children were there to help.  Watching a 10-year-old discover what their mom or dad did all day was half the fun.  The other half was the tour, where the Hotel Manager skipped the boring parts of the hotel and went straight for the fun: the Presidential Suite, the “guts” of the hotel, and the roof.  I learned two lessons that day.  First, do not let Chef build a menu around doughnuts and candy jars (two dozen kids hopped up on sugar are hard to corral).  Second, skip the boring orientation video. Kids do not want to sit through an HR lecture.  All they wanted to do was see the roof. 

I certainly cannot forget the summer picnics. The procurement found the venue, the chef loaded up on all the summer fare like hamburgers, hot dogs, ice cream bars and popsicles (this is one event that we didn’t worry if kids ate too much sugar), and maintenance got the glamorous job of clearing the goose poop off the grass before HR planted the cornhole boards and ring toss. Goose poop pickup wasn’t listed on the to-do list, but it had to be done. 

Nobody tells you that planning employee events invites the people to comment and complain.  About every aspect of the event.  Over the years, I heard people complain about practically everything. HR doesn't want to plan parties. Employees don't want to attend events outside the workday. The chef is tired of the same old menu. Department heads don't want to figure out scheduling so employees can attend while the hotel still runs. It reminds me of the age-old phrase "you can't please everyone." I used to fight that. I'd bend over backwards trying to find the date, the menu, the format that worked for every single person. Eventually I accepted that pleasing everyone isn't the goal. Giving everyone the opportunity to have fun at work was a goal.  Giving them the opportunity to get to know their co-workers outside of the hotel was another.  Giving everyone a choice was the third.

If you wanted to attend with your family, we were able to make that happen.  If you’d rather skip the event so you can pick up an extra shift, we made than an option, too.  If you didn't want to attend and didn't want to work either, we did our best to make that happen too. Food allergies? Accommodated. No way to get to the venue? We hired a bus to run back and forth from the hotel.

We made another change that employees really cared about.   Instead of a committee made up of just HR, the Chef, and the General Manager, we invited a representative from every department to join us. HR was the de facto complaint department and we'd already heard every gripe about the date, the food, the activities, and having to work before attending. Opening up the committee turned those complaints into input. The same people who grumbled about last year's picnic were now the ones picking this year's menu. These events were for the employees, after all. (Not for HR. Not for the General Manager). Once employees had a hand in planning them, the events stopped being something the company did to them and became something they did together.

What does any of this have to do with retention? Nobody stays at a job because of a summer picnic. People stay at jobs where somebody listened to their input and let them create a true employee event, for the employees, by the employees.

Companies think the perk is the event. It's not. The perk is everything wrapped around the event. It’s letting the employee pick up extra shifts instead of guilting them into attending. It’s putting a dishwasher on the planning committee and using his creativity.  It’s offering time away from the hotel to have fun and laugh. 

Employees enjoyed Bring Your Kids to Work Day more than I expected. The kids got to see where Mom and Dad worked.  The housekeeper’s daughter got a tour of the Presidential Suite that her mom had cleaned.  The maintenance engineer’s kid got to see the guts of the hotel where dad spent hours fixing the HVAC system. The Chef’s twins got to see the beautiful cakes that Dad baked to impress the guests.  Those employees’ sons and daughters now know where Mom and Dad go each day and they think their parent’s job is the coolest thing in the world.  It’s hard to leave a job your kids are proud of. 

None of these events broke the bank.  There was no Ping Pong table in any of these stories and no fancy benefits package, though you should probably offer good benefits, if you can.  What these perks took was time, attention, and someone willing to plan them.  Any business can afford that, whether you have 500 employees or 15. 

You still won't please everyone. Do it anyway!