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Modern employees want and expect a slew of great lifestyle benefits. None of them are as essential as retirement planning or medical coverage, but all of them do their bit to elevate the employee experience. This guide discusses how to offer unique lifestyle benefits to create an inclusive company culture your employees will never want to leave.
Lifestyle benefits refer to non-salaried perks provided by employers, such as wellness programs, flexible work arrangements, and professional development opportunities. Also known as fringe benefits, employers offer them to improve their employees’ quality of life and job satisfaction.
Lifestyle benefits can be misunderstood as including anything that enhances an employee’s life inside and outside the workplace. The reality is that all benefits are designed to improve their life in some shape or form, but the following don’t count as lifestyle benefits:
Ancillary lifestyle benefits allow employers to get creative with supporting their employees’ whole selves at work. Here are some common types of lifestyle benefits you might include in your package:
If you’re new to offering lifestyle perks, be inspired by how the following Benepass customers have incorporated them into their unique benefits strategies:
Mercury supports its 500+ U.S. and Canadian employees with a flexible wellness stipend, which its employees can spend on a broad range of spending categories, such as:
The company boasts a 92% engagement rate in its benefits package, signaling how much they enhance the employee experience.
Before offering a lifestyle spending account (LSA), Seres Therapeutics offered fitness and tuition reimbursement programs that suffered from low engagement rates due to the admin required. For example, only 25% of employees engaged with the fitness program and often missed the deadline to submit their claims.
Using the new LSA approach, employees use their monthly funds to spend on a variety of items or services, like:
For added flexibility, employees can roll over any unspent funds to the following month with a hard expiration date at the end of the year. This is great for anyone who wants to save up for a large purchase like a vacation or employees who need more time to commit to their monthly LSA spending.
Lead Bank is based in Kansas City, Missouri, but has a large hybrid workforce nationwide. Although the employer previously offered robust benefits, including medical, dental, and vision care, dependent care, and more, Lead Bank needed a more scalable approach to its lifestyle benefits and didn’t want the burden of using reimbursements.
Lead Bank can offer its employees a personalized approach to lifestyle benefits by offering a lifestyle spending account. For example, its wellness category doesn’t just include fitness and mental health services; it also provides Botox and acupuncture treatments, too.
Muck Rack has a vast workforce in 28 states and eight countries; in 2022 alone, 100 new employees joined the company. The company’s original perks plan centered on a reimbursement model, where employees tracked their receipts, uploaded them to an app, and created a report for the finance department to review.
Muck Rack has switched to a Benepass LSA—employees use their pre-funded Benepass Visa card to spend money on a range of categories, including:
Wix has a large number of remote employees based across North America. The employer wanted to offer fair and equitable food perks to workers regardless of geographical location. Using a single food delivery supplier isn’t a good fit in this scenario, as few are able to offer a consistent service across all localities.
Instead, Wix chose to use Benepass to offer food benefits. Its employees can now access a biweekly allowance for anything food-related, including groceries, deliveries, subscription boxes, and local restaurants.
This has been an incredibly successful move for Wix, with a 100% perfect scorecard in employee engagement.
Crunchbase has a diverse workforce spanning 16+ U.S. states in a remote-first setup. The company has always been eager to offer generous lifestyle perks that support its people—however, previous iterations of its benefits programs have fallen short due to the clunkiness of reimbursements and problems with declined card transactions.
By switching to Benepass, the company now offers a range of benefits, including a wellness account where employees can spend money on perks like nutrition, mental health, spa and beauty, pet care, and parental expenses.
Crunchbase now has a 95% engagement rate in its program.
Here are some of the main considerations when offering employee lifestyle perks:
Employers offering lifestyle benefits send their people a clear message—they care. They want their employees to access personalized perks that are meaningful to them as individuals.
And when employees start to enjoy the wealth of benefits available to them, this has an incredible impact on their satisfaction levels and morale.
When employee sentiment is positive, your workers won’t want to leave. If they rely on your benefit to pay for a gym membership that improves their physical and mental health or to fund their family vacation, there’s no reason to look for employment elsewhere.
As a bonus, lifestyle benefits also attract hordes of top-tier talent who recognize your investment in them as people. Here is a stat worth noting: 73% of employees consider work-life balance a priority when selecting an employer.
For this reason, the right blend of lifestyle perks can set you apart from competitors, bolster your employer brand, and position you as an employer of choice.
Many types of lifestyle benefits offer a cultural return on your investment. For example, employee recognition programs will prompt peers to appreciate each others’ contributions to the business, resulting in a supportive team environment. Similarly, professional development benefits foster a culture of continuous learning, motivating individuals to reach their full potential.
Unlike other benefits like health reimbursement arrangements or flexible spending accounts, lifestyle spending accounts and other stipends reduce an employee’s post-tax income. However, many workers would happily accept this trade-off for the breadth of employee benefits they receive for their money.
While some aspects of your lifestyle benefits program support health and wellness, they’re not an alternative to comprehensive medical coverage.
Your ancillary lifestyle benefits may include mental health services and access to natural therapies like reflexology or reiki. But they won’t include preventative healthcare or medical diagnostics that can protect you from serious disease.
In a lifestyle reimbursement model, employees front the cost of benefits and then file an expense claim. The benefits administrator will approve (or reject) the claim and reimburse the employee for the cost of the benefits.
Lifestyle reimbursements can be cumbersome to manage. They require employees to keep documentation and go through a reimbursement process, which often results in a delay in receiving their money. There’s a lot of administration involved for benefits teams, too. An alternative is to use a lifestyle spending account.
A lifestyle spending account, or LSA, provides post-tax funds for employees to spend on various eligible spending categories. Employers put a set monthly allowance into the LSA, and employees can use it for things like wellness, fitness, childcare, or professional development.
Some employers will set unused funds to expire as part of a “use it or lose it” model. Others will allow the money to roll over, enabling employees to put it toward bigger ticket purchases.
Unlike reimbursements, there’s no admin involved for the employee. They simply choose what to spend their money on based on the eligibility criteria, then sit back and enjoy their purchases.
Lifestyle benefits are just one of the types of benefits you can offer with Benepass. Our versatile, people-first platform allows you to choose the perfect mix of perks and benefits to match your employees’ unique needs.
Here’s how some employees use their Benepass LSA:
Ready to support your employees with lifestyle benefits they can personalize to their unique requirements? Book a free Benepass demo today.
