With an economy that is largely driven by technology firms, American is seeing many traditional workplace paradigms being blown apart and disrupted, and this has far-reaching impacts in some surprising places. It’s not just the changing look of the modern office — or the fact that many professionals today consider home their office — working for companies that encourage working remotely.
Bigger still, is a shifting philosophy, driven by tech companies, to compete aggressively for talent by offering innovative health and wellness programs as the latest package of perks. Take Silicon Valley, where high salaries, table tennis tables and free food and espresso machines have turned the notion of 9-to-5 on its face. Suddenly, the tech titans are also rolling out free gadgets for employees to promote corporate wellness and offering robust maternity and paternity leave, fertility coverage and more.
The idea is to battle for the best software engineers knowing that funky food trucks and a free laundry service will no longer cut it. Instead, Silicon Valley and the startups it inspires are trying to lure candidates with health management programs that can include acupuncture, fertility treatments and health benefits for same-sex partners.
These cutting-edge companies are also providing wearable devices to manage wellness so employees can get an edge fighting high cholesterol or working on weight loss. The calculation, like with most wellness initiatives, is that healthy employees can reduce healthcare costs for the company while spurning higher productivity. The gamble doesn’t have a ton of empirical evidence to back it up as yet, but the trend is spreading nevertheless.
In the past decade, the number of companies that offered some form of weight loss or cholesterol management corporate program more than doubled. So, while your office may not yet have a table tennis table, the chances are rising that its wellness perks will soon see a bounce. What are you doing to improve the wellness of your employees?