71: Perks & Benefits: A Look Inside the Team Bonnie Handbook
1 Aug 2023 · 21 min
In this solo episode of the Professional Creative Podcast, host Bonnie Christine opens and walks listeners through Team Bonnie’s employee handbook. She begins by explaining why caring for employees through perks and benefits builds culture, loyalty, and retention. Bonnie distinguishes between benefits (formal, non‑wage compensation such as health insurance, 401(k) match, paid time off, maternity, medical, bereavement, disaster, unlimited unpaid leave, and sabbaticals) and perks (extra, fun‑focused offerings that reinforce team values). She recounts the handbook’s origin—developed secretly for a team retreat, guided by the "clear is kind" philosophy from Brené Brown, and informed by a pre‑retreat survey. The episode then details the full suite of benefits and perks, including financial wellness programs, a $1,000 paid‑vacation bonus, 11 paid holidays (including each employee’s birthday), various leave policies, equipment and internet stipends, a $2,500 annual learning & development budget, $100 monthly health‑and‑wellness and house‑cleaning budgets, flexible and summer hours, a trial four‑day workweek, complimentary product access, a charitable‑giving program (team‑chosen $10,000 donation plus $1,000 personal donations), and a quarterly incentive bonus up to 20% of salary. Finally, Bonnie offers a step‑by‑step framework for leaders to create their own team handbooks: identify needs, brainstorm options, evaluate feasibility, implement gradually, and regularly review with feedback. Throughout, she emphasizes aligning perks with core values, gathering employee input, and iterating to sustain a supportive, vibrant team culture.
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These things really tell your employees that you value their well being, not just their output. It really helps cultivate a culture on the team and really in the long run helps cultivate loyalty and retention to your team as well. You know, it is so much more about just what we get done. It's about building relationships with each other and really adding to everyone's life, not just taking from it. Foreign Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. When I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. Today I'm opening the Team Handbook for Team Bonnie Christine and I want to share with you some of the things that are inside, specifically the perks that people on Team Bonnie receive. We're also going to talk about the page benefits, but before I get there, I'm also going to cover how the Team Handbook came to be, how I created it, why I created it, Then I'm going to share some of the specifics with you, and then I'm going to give you an overview of how you could get started creating your own Team Handbook if you want. Now, I know some of you don't have a team, or you might just have one or two people who help you out, or perhaps they are contractors in your business. But I wanted to do this episode because when I set out about a year ago to create our Team Handbook, I found it really difficult. I couldn't find very much information on how to create a handbook, what I needed to put inside of it. And so even if you don't have a team right now, I'm hoping that this episode is one that you'll save and come back to because there are so many things to think about when it comes to fostering team culture and really taking care of your people. Before we dive in, I want to give you kind of an introduction to the difference between perks and benefits because I think sometimes they get, you know, used interchangeably, but they are a little bit different. Perks and benefits are both advantages provided to an employee beyond their regular salaries or hourly wages. And there are some differences. So benefits are typically forms of non wage compensation that are offered to your employees and they often include things like health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and things like maternity leave. The benefits you can think of are kind of the more serious or substantial offerings that directly impact an employee's quality of life. Now, perks are where in my mind I get to have a little bit of fun. These are extra advantages or bonuses that are designed to enhance the workplace environment and very specific to your employees. They are things that are unique to supporting our team values and I like to think about them as icing on the cake. So we'll get to exactly what our perks and benefits on Team Bonnie are in just a little bit. Before we get there though, I wanted to talk about really the origin of the team handbook and why we needed one. So we had, I believe, six people on the team before I had a team handbook. And we have a couple of things that we put into. One rule that we have on the team is this philosophy of clear is kind. And we got this from Brene Brown. Brene teaches this rule. Clear is kind. Clear is kind really means that the clearer you can be, the kinder it is. Even if it's difficult or if it's a difficult conversation, clear is always the kindest way to go about it. So we really realized that there were a lot of things on the team that just weren't clear. Like of course you can take time off. If you need time off, just let us know. Or you know, maybe there is some budget. If you need new equipment, just let us know. And those things are not very clear. There's not a clear process. And it means that someone working for you doesn't really know how to approach it, doesn't really know like how much the budget is and things like that. So when I set out to develop the handbook with, we had our team retreat coming up and this is such a fun thing. I didn't tell anybody that I was working on it. And normally I would have brought Lisa, my integrator, into it and maybe Rebecca, my designer in to help me create the PDF. But I wanted very much to surprise everyone with the handbook. So I developed the entire thing on my own. And so that year we had our team retreat. This was just about a year ago in Phoenix, Arizona. And I'll never forget the moment we were coming together around a table to begin the day and I got to hand out, I got them printed beautifully and I got to hand out our team handbook to everyone there. And we spent about an hour just going through it. And at some point people were laughing, at some point people were crying. And it was such a fun thing as a leader to be able to deliver to the team. It's something that I'm really proud of. And again, we're about a year into using it and it's gone really, really well. So the way that I set out to create it was not only to do a lot of research, but to also really involve the team without letting them know that I was working on a team handbook. So I surveyed everyone on the team before our team retreat and I just had a couple of questions in there that I knew would be able to help inform me when I got to creating our handbook. So one of the questions was, is there a perk or a benefit that you would love to have on the team? And so some people had some really great ideas that I was able to pull from. There's so many reasons that having a clear team handbook is so incredibly important. One of them is just around motivation and productivity. This can really boost morale and help drive performance and even really help spur creativity. For instance, one of our perks is that we have Fridays off in the summer. And so this is the first summer that we've been exploring Fridays off. And so we created a new Slack channel called Summer Fridays. And everyone gets to come in and really talk about what they're doing for that Friday. And it's just a fun way to really boost each other's creativity. Oftentimes they are taking off to go on vacation or a little trip, or oftentimes they're working on their own business on Fridays as well. So it's been really fun to not only implement it, but implement a way for us to share about it as well. And that really builds team culture as well. The next one is loyalty and work life balance. You know, perks and benefits can really increase loyalty. These things really tell your employees that you value their well being, not just their output. It really helps cultivate a culture on the team and really in the long run, helps cultivate loyalty and retention to your team as well. You know, it is so much more about just what we get done. It's about building relationships with each other and really adding to everyone's life, not just taking from it. And of course, we wanted to customize our perks and benefits that Were really like tailor them to our team's needs and preferences. And so that survey was a huge part of it. But we also have team values and I tried to customize our perks to better support our values as well. So I want to kind of breeze through the benefits of someone who's working on Team Bonnie because I really want to spend most of the time on the perks because I had so much fun developing them. But we do have a a large list of benefits for everyone who's an employee at Team Bonnie. The first one is all about financial wellness. We offer a 401k plan to everyone on the team and the company will match employee contributions. And so this is up through a company called Human Interest and we've had a great experience with them. We also have several different ways for leave and time off. One is vacation time. So employees get PTO or paid time off. And that's set up differently whether you're on salary or hourly for us, but everyone gets PTO in a given year. We also do something really fun called a paid vacation. And so this is where employees receive $1,000 as a bonus, one vacation every calendar year when they take at least five consecutive days off. And so they're not allowed to check in. They can also bump it up against a weekend so they can get potentially like seven to nine days off if they want. But everyone on the team gets that, which has been so fun. To really help support this balance of enjoying time off as well, we also have 11 paid holidays. That's New Year's Day, Good Friday, Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas, and everyone's own birthday is a paid holiday for that person. Next, we include sick time, mental health time, and well being time anytime someone needs to take time off. For those, we also do maternity leave. Up to eight weeks of paid leave for anyone who is having a baby or adopting a child. We have medical leave up to four weeks of medical leave anytime someone has an illness or an injury. Similarly, we also include up to two weeks of bereavement leave and up to two weeks of disaster leave, which of course we hope no one ever has to take. We also have an unlimited amount of unpaid leave. So if anyone needs to take extra time off, they can always put in an unpaid leave request. And then the last one is a sabbatical. So if you reach five continuous years with the team, you get four weeks of paid sabbatical leave and then every three years after that. So that's Just a quick overview of the benefits you get as a part of Team Bonnie. Now I want to go into some of the perks that the team gets. This was really fun for me. It was kind of like walking into Disneyland for taking care of your team. And I had so much fun. Just really what would make everyone's time here really just worth it and exciting and also, again, reinforce the values that we have on the team as well. So some of the perks that you get as part of being on Team Bonnie is an equipment budget. So we all work virtually, and we all are heavily involved in tech, meaning we have computers and cameras and, you know, iPads sometimes to assist in our work. And so sometimes people just come to the and they're in need of updating their equipment. So anyone on the core team, which is an employee, receives a $2,000 equipment budget upon coming onto the team. And then after that, we give $1,000 every two years. That is specific to, like, updating equipment. And then everyone also gets a $360 stipend every year to cover Internet expenses. We also have a learning and development budget. We call this the L and D Bud. So very much value growth and skill enhancement. Everyone gets an annual budget of $2,500 towards learning. So this can be used for books or classes or conferences or a certification course, as long as it is submitted and approved. And it kind of needs to go along with your role at Team Bonnie to enhance your skill set that you use on the team. We also have a health and wellness budget, and this really supports our value that a healthy body equals a healthy mind. So we give each team member a monthly budget of $100 for a health and wellness initiative. So that could be a gym membership, yoga classes, a personal trainer, or any other approved health program. One that I'm really proud of as well is a house cleaning budget. I firsthand just know the challenge of blending work and home. We have several women on the team who have young children, and everyone is working from home. So to really just promote that productive environment, everyone on the team gets a monthly budget of a hundred dollars for house cleaning. Okay, so the next one is flexible hours and summer hours. We have this kind of max flex approach to work. There are times where we all need to be online at the same time, but for a lot of things, it can really be done whenever it works best for the person. So team members, within reason, set their own schedules, and they just have to communicate those with the rest of the team. We also have several different time zones represented on the team. And so it's fairly flexible as long as the work gets done. We also are trying for the first time a four day work week. So from June 1st to August 31st, we implement a four day work week. I'll have to tell you more about that, but that has been really fun. The next one is complimentary access to all of our products. Of course, if you're on the team, you get access to everything that goes out from an education perspective. And then we also let everyone give access to one product to one person per year that's outside of our organization. The next one that I talked about recently on our giving episode is charitable contributions. I believe in giving back so much. And so 10% of the company's gross revenue is always donated to charitable causes every year. But each team member also gets to submit a charity of their choice. And then we do an anonymous vote and the winner gets a ten thousand dollar donation in their name made to that charity. And even if yours didn't get chosen from the team vote, we also give a $1,000 donation to everyone's charity that they chose in that person's name. Finally, we have something called the quarterly goals incentive bonus. And so this begins after you're with us for one year and we then begin to create quarterly goals for everyone on the team. And based on your performance, you can earn up to 20% of your salary or your average wages for that quarter based on how were able to accomplish those goals. And so that's an entire system in and of itself. If you're interested in learning more about that, I can do an episode on our quarterly goals incentive bonuses. But we are about a year and a half into this program and we have really loved it. So that kind of sums up our suite of benefits and perks. I think developing this and the team handbook has been one of the best things that I ever did as a leader of this team. And I think that the team would tell you the same thing. It has just really enhanced our culture and the way that we work together. So I want to talk to you about creating your own, maybe like a starter guide to creating your own team handbook. And the first thing I would say is really just identify the needs. Identify your team's unique needs, their unique preferences and your unique values. And this can be done by maybe surveying your team team or just having a team meeting or maybe just one on one discussions around what do the people on your team really value and what do they really need. The next step would just be to brainstorm. Do Some research and gather a list of potential benefits and perks that you might need on your team and then have fun with it. I'm encouraging creativity here. It should be something fun to do. Then you'll need to evaluate, you know, really weigh the feasibility of each perk or benefit against your company's budget and capacity. Capacity. Is it something that you can afford? Is it something that you can build into your program? And is it something that you'll be able to do for a long time? Then you'll move into implementation. So you'll need to start small if you need to, and really create a process and a plan as you roll out each one, but announce them and begin creating a process for tracking them and, you know, delivering them. And then finally you'll just want to regularly review them. You'll want to survey maybe six months or a year in and just get feedback from the people who are receiving your perks and benefits and, you know, be ready to make a change if necessary. So as you really brainstorm the perks and benefits that you want to give to your team, I want to encourage you to really look back at your values. You know, we value health. And so the health and wellness budget was a clear way to put our money where our mouth is sort of thing. We always talk about really valuing balance and, you know, having work time and then family time. And so a four day work week and flexible hours was an easy one to come up with. And then I always really talk about how, especially as women and mothers, we cannot do it all. And so the house cleaning budget was an easy one to say yes to. But that's a great example of one that I'm not sure I would have come up with on my own. But someone in our team survey brought it up that they had seen another company offering it and how cool it would be if we could offer that as well. And I absolutely loved it. Just don't forget to always get feedback. You want to start with some feedback around what the people who are working with you would really enjoy and then you want to get feedback later on after you've implemented it and just listen to your team and figure out what's working and what isn't and if there's something else that they would prefer. So I hope that opening up our team handbook for you today was just kind of exciting and interesting for you to listen to. I hope that you can wrap your mind around maybe embracing this for yourself and the people who are working with you. I think as we begin to develop teams and work with people. It is so incredibly important to attract the right people and really take care of them once they're inside your world, because they are everything. I wouldn't be where I am today without the team that I have, and I want to make sure that they always know that I know that, that I appreciate them and that we're really always working to develop a team culture that is fun and exciting and gives them life. If you would like a recap of this episode, of the benefits and the perks that I covered, you can head on over to the show Notes for this episode. Those are@Propriecreative.com My friends create the beauty that to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.