MBA1645 Q&A Wednesday: How can I provide some company perks on the cheap? Any advice?

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Today's question is from Patrick and Patrick asks I have a small remote team of around 10 people and I want to reward my team members. I can't give them significant raises, but I want to give them some company perks. Do you have any ideas for company perks on the cheap? Any advice would be appreciated. Love the podcast. Thank you so much for your help Patrick. Great question Patrick. And I love the fact that you're trying to help help your team out, make them feel valued and significant even if you're on a budget. I love this mentality because something is better than nothing. Patrick could easily just be like, you know what, I don't have enough raises. Forget it, pocket the cash instead. He's trying to reinvest in his team in any way possible. So I want to share with You a few things you can consider, even a few things you can offer to your team members as company perks that won't break the bank. Some of these perks actually will help productivity and produce better results. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Many of you know that I read 50 business books every single year, and many of these books talk about company culture and investing in your team. They talk about how your team members, your talent is your biggest asset. So investing in it is always going to help your bottom line in the long run. So I love Patrick's question about introducing company perks. Even if he's on a budget, he says on the cheap. So I want to suggest a few perks that you can offer that won't cost you too much, but will give you maximum results. Perk number one comes from basecamp. I learned this from the team at basecamp. During the summer months, I think June, July, August, these three months when the day is long and there's a lot of sunshine, they want to reward their team members and kind of just, hey, you know, life is important too. Go ahead and enjoy the awesome weather. Now, Basecamp prefaces this. They don't really do any big launches or big product updates in these three months. It's not a high pressure time. They plan it that way. So what's the perk? Well, they give them Friday off every Friday in those three months. So basically they have a four day week for about a quarter of the year. This is like a huge perk for a lot of the team members on basecamp. They love it because it makes them feel refreshed. It makes them feel like they have work life balance. It's pretty fantastic. Now, if you know a little bit about basecamp, you know that they kind of do things full on and you might say, whoa, that's a lot of time away from work. I'm not sure if I can afford my team to be off that much, and that's totally reasonable. But you can take the spirit of this idea maybe the first Friday of every month, you do half day Fridays. Now, many people that have tried this type of perk say that productivity doesn't drop. It actually goes up because come Friday, most people are pretty burnt out from all the work of the week. So a half day really doesn't affect too much because you're not really getting much out of them that last half of the last day of the week. But it's perceived as a great little perk for you as a team member and it really makes people feel valued and feel like, hey, I can sort of have a long weekend every single month. Another perk that you may want to consider are offside days. You don't need to do a full on team retreat for a week at an exotic location. If your team is local, if you have all your team members in the same kind of area once a quarter, you can spend, you know, a Friday, a day of the week, a workday, just the day off site. Maybe you can do something at a park, do team building activities, go to the beach. This sounds like a lot of fun, but it's also a great team building activity. Now, if you're on a remote team like Patrick, you still do this online. Now instead of going somewhere like an off site, you just do something different. This could be a professional development day where everybody kind of shares a tactic or a skill that might benefit the team. And it could be about work, it could be about life, about relaxation, about how to plan a holiday, whatever it is. But it could be like a show and tell for your team members. The point is, is you get them out of their routine. It gets them thinking that, you know, work and life and development is all very important. So let's make sure that we make time for it. Another great perk are parties, are virtual parties. You can do this based on performance or maybe just a regular thing. At our company, Webinar Ninja, we do a pizza party when our customer support team hits their target goal for CSAF or customer satisfaction. Now, even though we're all remote, we still enjoy pizza on our own turf, on our own dining tables, and we take pictures and sometimes we do a video call to kind of just rejoice in our victory with a nice slice. Another great perk that doesn't cost too much is some sort of allotment or allowance for professional development. Now, this might be a nerdy perk, but a lot of people want to buy books to improve or to get better at a certain skill. And it doesn't have to primarily be about their job role or job description. They could branch out, they could try to improve other skills. And it doesn't need to be like some huge amount of money. Like you can even just say every employee gets, you know, $50 or $100 a year to spend on books. Now, even though it's not a lot of money per person, but it's something, you know, I can buy a few books on my Kindle, I can buy a few audiobooks and change my perspective and learn new things. It encourages People to really check out what's out there, especially when it's paid for. It's like a gift certificate. When somebody gives you a gift certificate, you feel compelled to use it. Another great perk that doesn't cost too much is surprise swag. And we do this when people join our team. You know, when somebody onboards or becomes a new team member, we collect a whole bunch of information, including their mailing address. And the reason why is because we want to send them a couple of new T shirts to wear and to enjoy. And we don't tell them this is coming, but they just get it in the mail as like a prize. And they're like, wow, this is amazing. Gift from my employer. Another thing we do for new hires is we send them a welcome video. And this welcome video is basically just a montage of all our team members saying, welcome. It didn't cost us much to make that video, but it actually has an interesting touch. A lot of our new employees that have experienced that, they're like, I really liked that video. That was really nice. And it makes them feel valued. It makes them just feel like, I'm joining a team that cares. Another great perk I've seen other companies do, like Meet Edgar and Buffer, is they will give some sort of allowance for house cleaning. So they run remote teams and what they do is maybe they'll give them an allowance of one house clean a month. And for a lot of people, that's one of their favorite perks because it saves them time. They don't have to clean on their weekend. They get to enjoy the weekend, the cleaners come and they can just like watch Netflix. What I found is that the perks that people use or enjoy the most are the ones that actually fulfill a need. Something you have to do, like cleaning. My buddy Noah KAGAN over at AppSumo, they have a physical building, a physical office where all their employees kind of work. And I think once a month they bring in a masseuse. And he found that, that not a lot of people use this perk. Some people don't like massages. Some people just don't have the time. They're busy at work. But something like house cleaning, it's like, I gotta get my house cleaned. And the fact that I have the opportunity to take a perk that somebody's gonna do it for me, it's really appreciated. The all new five year business boost from Comcast Business. It's the certainty of a price lock for five years on qualifying Internet bundles. Plus the most reliable WI Fi with their best equipment and ask about a $500 prepaid card when you add two lines of mobile. The five year business boost only from Comcast Business powering possibilities ends 22226 new customers only one year contract required for guaranteed rate. Five year pricing applies to monthly service charge excluding taxes and fees. Best WI Fi based on Open Signal Awards USA Fixed Broadband Experience Report May 2025.

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To wrap up today's lessons, there are a lot of options when it comes to company perks on a budget. One of the best ways to choose which perk to provide or which perks is to ask yourself how much money, how much surplus do I want to spend on perks this coming year? And then divide that by the number of team members you have or you project to have by the end of the year. And there you have it. The actual dollar amount, how much you can spend for each person. Say for example, you have an extra $2,000 and you have 10 employees. That means you got $200 you can use on each employee this year. So you might say $50 on books. You'll do a few pizza parties for each team member. That's another hundred dollars and fifty bucks for maybe some surprise swag. Even though these are small and inexpensive, a lot of times when it comes to perks, it's the thought that counts. It's the fact that you're trying to to take care of your team members and that you took the time and the thought to come up with them. Thanks so much for listening to the Hunter LMBA Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you don't miss a beat. Subscribing is absolutely free and you could do it on any app that you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Stitcher Radio or Spotify or Himalaya or on every single platform. So hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this if none of these ideas work for you, you can always give a cash bonus or a gift certificate. So at the end of the day, even if it's a hundred dollars, that's $100 they didn't have before and it means something. It could be a dinner out courtesy of the company they work for. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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