Silicon Valley has new perks for employees

Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, turned to his wife last year and asked if she had suggestions for how the software company might improve the lives of its employees and their families. His wife, who also works at Evernote, didn't miss a beat: housecleaning.

Today, Evernote's 250 employees - every full-time worker, from receptionist to top executive - have their homes cleaned twice a month, free.

It is the latest innovation from Silicon Valley: the employee perk is moving from the office to the home. Facebook gives new parents $4,000 in spending money. Stanford School of Medicine is piloting a project to provide doctors with housecleaning and in-home dinner delivery. Genentech offers take-home dinners and helps employees find last-minute baby sitters when a child is too sick to go to school.

These kinds of benefits are a departure from the upscale cafeteria meals, massages and other services intended to keep employees happy and productive while at work. And the goal is not just to reduce stress for employees, but for their families, too. If the companies succeed, the thinking goes, they will minimise distractions and sources of tension that can inhibit focus and creativity.

Now that technology has allowed work to bleed into home life, it seems that companies are trying to address the impact of home life on work.

There is, of course, the possibility that relieving people of chores at home will simply free them up to work more. But David Lewin, a compensation expert and management professor at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles, said he viewed the perks as part of a growing effort by American business to reward people with time and peace of mind instead of more traditional financial tools, like stock options and bonuses.

"They're trying to get at people's larger lives and sanity," Lewin said. "You might call it the bang for the nonbuck."

At Deloitte, the consulting firm, employees can get a backup care worker sent to their home if anaging parent or grandparent needs help. The company subsidises personal trainers and nutritionists, and offers round-the-clock counselling service for help with issues like marital strife and infertility. Deloitte executives, and other experts, said they believe such benefits were likely to spread.

"The workplace was built on the assumption that there was somebody at home dealing with the home front," said Anne Weisberg, a long-time human resources executive who helped write a book about new kinds of workplace policies.

Not only is that no longer the case, she said, but the work-life pressures seem to be building. "There's a greater awareness that we're pushing things to the limit and something's got to give," she said.

Hannah Valantine, a cardiologist, professor and associate dean at the Stanford School of Medicine, said the university's experiment with helping out at home is part of a broader effort by the institution to support doctors, given their hyperkinetic pace of life.

"If you're coming home at the end of the day exhausted and you have a pile of cleaning to do, it's the kind of things that leads rapidly to burnout, and burned-out physicians don't give the best care," Valantine said. "We're trying to send a very strong message that the institution cares about you and about your life."

Some compensation experts argue these types of perks ultimately do little to attract employees and might obscure more fundamental problems at companies that have trouble retaining talent.

That is a challenge Stanford owns up to, given the brain drain suffered by academic hospitals, where relentless demands include treating patients, writing grants, doing research and traveling to conferences.

So 18 months ago, Stanford hired a consulting firm called Jump Associates to better understand why so many academic doctors feel burned out. The company videotaped them from the time they woke up, through the workday and until they and their families went to sleep.

In one video, a kidney specialist told a story that shocked the researchers: While she was on maternity leave, she bought a minivan to ferry the children of friends and neighbours to school and sports practices.

That way, the doctor explained, she would be able to ask for favours when she returned to work - and that, in theory, would enable her to juggle the dual demands of work and family.

In another interview, a doctor in her eighth month of pregnancy told researchers that she was signing up for more on-call shifts than ever. Her motivation? While she was not required to do the extra work, she said she hoped it would give her a clear conscience when she took a few months off with her baby.

Valantine said the findings had led her to scrap the idea that people should strive for "work-life balance" and instead think in terms of "work-life integration."

That shifting mindset - the idea that life and work must be blended rather than separated - is increasingly common, according to other doctors, scholars who study work habits and Silicon Valley workers like Andrew Sinkov, 31, a vice president of marketing at Evernote, a digital note-taking service.

"'Life-work balance' is a nonsense term," Sinkov said. "The idea that I have to segment work and life is based on some archaic lunar-calendar thing."

Given that his employer is paying to clean his apartment, Sinkov and his girlfriend do not have to quibble about cleanup duties. The value of the perk is greater than the money saved, he said.

"It eliminates a decision I have to make," Sinkov said. "It's just happening and it's good, and I don't have to think about it."

His boss, Libin, also gives employees $1,000 to spend on vacation, but it has to be "a real vacation."

"You can't visit the in-laws; you have to go somewhere," Libin said, adding that he did not see these perks just as ways to keep his workforce - and their families - engaged. He said he also tended to be frugal as a chief executive, preferring these types of peace-of-mind benefits to, say, business-class travel, which the company does not pay for.

"Happy workers make better products," he said. "The output we care about has everything to do with your state of mind."

At Google, the company has expanded its benefits beyond free meals, dry cleaning and other services on campus to offering $500 for new parents to spend on services and supplies. The company has also arranged for fresh fish to be delivered to the office for employees to take home and cook.

"What you've seen is benefits moving away from free food into thinking more holistically about individuals and their health," said Jordan Newman, a Google spokesman. "And a lot of that happens outside of the office."

At Facebook, employees can take home a free dinner each night or, if working late, their families can come in to eat with them, leading to a regular sight of children in the campus cafeteria. The company also pays $3,000 per family in child care expenses, and offers adoption assistance of up to $5,000.

Slater Tow, a Facebook spokesman, said company was not trying to be new age but simply strategic.

"We don't want to give aromatherapy for your dog," he said. "We want things that are functional for you and your family."

©2011 The New York Times News Service