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Your Top Travel Savings Tips

plane fly travel

 

If you’ve got Thanksgiving travel plans, whether you’re going by plane or car, gas isn’t cheap these days. Why pay full price on all those flights, rentals and hotels, when you could be saving hundreds every trip? Before you set off to your next destination, here’s some travel pro tips that can help you spend less on getting where you need to go.

Book Rental Cars Online, Not At The Airport

One of the easiest ways to save on rental cars is also one of the simplest – booking well in advance. Rates are much cheaper for rentals booked a few weeks in advance of travel, and especially better than what you’d pay after stepping out of the airport, where you can get hit with a head-spinning number of extra fees. Booking ahead of time also lets you use your online Discount Program, where your membership nabs you 25-35% off from most major car rental companies.

If You’ve Gotta Take a Flight, Get a Good Deal

While an airline loyalty card might save you some money, the real deals are in using a service like Scott’s Cheap Flights to find flights that’ll cost hundreds less. By monitoring fares and compiling the best possible deals, frequent fliers can find tickets for hundreds less. You can access membership to premium flight-discount services like this from your PerkSpot portal, plus find other great deals like 15% off airport parking with ParkNFly from your discount program’s travel center.

Keep Your Eyes Open to Save on Hotels

Even more so than rental cars or flights, you can get great deals on hotels if you know where to look. One of the best ways to get big savings on hotel stays is through your private discount program, where you can regularly find top hotel rooms listed for 30, 40, or even 50% off for both domestic and international travel.  Planning your travel around low-occupancy months can also help you save big on hotel stays, though that might not always be possible; but if you can schedule your travels away from tourist season, your wallet will thank you.

While grabbing all these great travel deals can save you hundreds or even thousands on getting around, there’s no denying that compiling the best flights, hotel bundles, and rental cars all in advance to get your savings can be a headache. 

Take Advantage of Your Discount Program

If you’ve already got PerkSpot, then your discount marketplace is already working overtime to bring you the best travel deals available anywhere. Instead of running across the internet looking for deals, all you have to do is sign in to your discount portal and navigate to the Travel Discount Center to find the best savings and bundles on hotels, rentals, flights and even cruises in one easy location. Say goodbye to deal hunting and start saving on your travel expenses! And if you don’t already have PerkSpot – well, now that you’ve heard how much you can save on your travel plans, what are you waiting for? Request a demo for free to claim your travel discounts today!

Scaling Your Culture While Keeping Employees Engaged

people at table scaling their culture

When your organization is growing fast, it’s an exciting thing! New clients, new opportunities, new employees – and often new culture brought with them as your organization adapts. But fast-paced growth also comes with its own set of unique challenges; as organizations become bigger and more difficult to manage, more apathetic employees can easily dilute an energetic company culture, tanking employee engagement – and morale with it. Keeping an increasingly large roster of unique employees actively engaged in company culture is a huge challenge. For a growing enterprise, strong, positive cultures are vital for productivity and retention; so you’ll have to tackle the daunting task of scaling culture.

Bring New Employees Into The Conversation

Organizations of any size, even those with codified values, are filled with unspoken norms. These small quirks and daily standards can’t be communicated in onboardings, but they form the most basic building-block of culture. It’s essential that new employees feel a part of these minor daily routines! An excellent way of achieving this is through a monthly meeting where newer employees can discuss the company’s culture. Alternatively, you can assign newer employees a veteran buddy to talk candidly about your ins and outs.

Use Benefits Levers To Provide A Universally Attractive Foundation

Certain traditions, such as monthly gatherings of all staff, may become logistically unfeasible as your organization grows. To replace them, you can leverage digital tools to instead offer benefits with universal appeal. While attractive benefits are no replacement for bottom-up culture, using levers like PerkSpot’s discount program can help engage growing cultures by giving new employees attractive reasons to approach the office with the same enthusiasm of their veteran colleagues. 

Be Flexible to New Quirks

With any influx of new employees, or even just a growing scope of your enterprise, it’s important to remember that the organization is never going to be exactly the same as it was – and that’s okay. Scaling your culture is the perfect time to codify your organization’s core values. You’ve got the unique chance now to really identify what makes your culture strong and successful. These core values should be your guiding torch to handling company-wide decisions and day-to-day interactions alike. With confidence in your example-setting, you can help maintain your organization’s positive cultural traits while also allowing new employees to add a piece of their own to the tapestry of your workspace.

Find Ways For Leadership To Engage Organically

It’s true that it’s a bit more difficult to do water-cooler talk over Zoom. Still, whether remote or in-person, it’s important that your organization’s leadership is accessible and engaged. Encouraging lower-pressure get-togethers, lunches, or similar events for teams or individual offices creates an environment where teams and leadership can come closer together. It’s also the perfect setting to reinforce a positive organizational culture!

Growing any organization is an exciting and fast-paced time to be involved, but it’s also a high-pressure environment. While one side of ensuring employee engagement is to provide enjoyable interaction opportunities, the other is to prevent burnout and disengagement through proper support and resources. As long as you can supply both sides of that equation to your employees, old and new, you’ll find any sort of cultural transition a breeze.

 

Flexible Benefits – What to Know

Woman enjoying her Flexible Benefits on phone by Bruce Mars

Watch out, traditional options plans, because flexible benefits are making big strides. While traditional benefit models provide specific, flat advantage is extended to the employee by their organization, ‘flexible’ or ‘personalized’ benefits challenge this entire hierarchical structure. These flexible benefits employees with stipends, allowing them to actively pick and choose the benefits they want to engage with. 

Building Custom Benefits for Your Workplace

But before we get to asking if flexible benefits might be right for your workplace, we should first figure out just what exactly these ‘personalized’ benefits look like. The most common type of flexible benefit is a benefits spending account. Instead of a direct benefit, employees receive specific stipends in their spending accounts that can be spent across a range of lifestyle benefits. A great example of this is a Lifestyle Spending Account. As opposed to hosting regular mandatory training sessions, employees with an LSA might receive a stipend to attend trainings and seminars that they find interesting or useful from a broader list. Employees might even receive stipends to build their own home office, fitness supplies, or maybe even just groceries! 

What makes flexible benefits so special – and so often highly well-received by employees – is right in the name; the tremendous level of flexibility they offer. Increasingly diverse workforces have similarly diverse needs, so a ‘flat’ benefit that might be a great boon for one employee – for instance, paternity leave for a new parent – isn’t going to help an employee with no plans of having a kid. By offering flexibility and personalization in benefits through stipends, your new parent might be able to spend his benefits on childcare supplies, while the child-free employee instead books a vacation!

Flexibility and Discount Programs

Although stipends are the most common, discount programs also fall into the category of highly customizable flexible benefits. Much like how a lifestyle stipend gives employees complete flexibility to purchase new gym equipment, bird-watching binoculars, or anything in between, having access to thousands of discounts means that employees have the freedom to pick out just the savings that matter to them – no matter their hobbies, situation, or identity.

Diversity and flexibility go hand in hand; diverse workplace situations require flexible mindsets, whether it’s in accounting for the needs of both in-person and remote employees or offering benefits attractive to individuals at entirely different life stages. By their very nature, no matter how unique your industry or employees, flexible benefits can fit right in.

That’s why you might want to consider PerkSpot for your company’s benefits suite. Not only does PerkSpot offer the adaptability of flexible benefits so that every employee can find something they’ll love – it’s also a no-cost solution, being completely free to add to your organization. Whether you’re looking for a cost-effective way to beef up your benefits or just a perk that everyone can enjoy, let’s talk about how PerkSpot’s discount program could be just the thing you need.

PerkSpot’s 2022 Midyear Digest

January Through June Client Success Roundup

It’s hard to believe that 2022 is already halfway over. But even so, the blazing summer skies here in Chicago are perfect for PerkSpot’s sunny entrance into the year! The first half of this year has had more amazing partnerships than ever before for this midyear PerkSpot Digest. In total, twenty-five new clients partnered with PerkSpot across Q1 and Q2 2022, offering best-in-class discounts to their employees. Following over a dozen industries, our new clients range from mid-size enterprises to universally known top brands. Regardless of size or industry, we’re proud to provide our easy-to-use, white-glove service for all our new clients!

hands

In 2022, we added new major clients in the fields of manufacturing, retail, healthcare, food and beverage, transportation, and more. We’re especially proud to highlight a few examples of the diverse clients PerkSpot’s personalized discount programs can add value to. So take a look at some of our newest success stories in the making:

 

Wow Bao logo for PerkSpot Digest

Wow Bao – Offering Asian street food in over five hundred locations across the country, Wow Bao is an American food industry staple with their distinctive steamed buns.

Forever 21 PerkSpot Digest Logo

Forever 21 – Based out of Los Angeles, Forever 21 is a top American retailer offering fast fashion options for American shoppers across the country. 

 

3M Club PerkSpot Digest Logo

3M – A multinational innovation powerhouse, 3M sports over 100,000 manufacturing patents including adhesives, PPE, medical equipment, office supplies, and more. 

 

MoneyLion Logo

MoneyLion– An innovative new way to bank, MoneyLion offers thousands of customers easy options to borrow, save, invest and earn in one all-inclusive financial app. 

 

Sanford Health PerkSpot Digest Logo

 

Sanford Health – Sanford Health is the largest health system in the Rural United States, a nonprofit headquartered in Sioux Falls.  Sanford operates a global healthcare presence with an emphasis on pediatrics, cancer, heart, sports medicine, and women’s health.

Michaels Stores – Michaels is one of North America’s largest providers of arts, crafts, framing, floral and wall décor, with over one thousand arts and crafts stores across the United States and Canada.

 

We’re excited to serve our newest clients; always with the same attention to detail and enthusiastic, human-centric approach that PerkSpot has become known for! And especially if your organization could benefit from exclusive, custom discounts, we’d love to have you schedule a demo today to start the conversation!

 

Providing Benefits to a Multigenerational Workforce

Younger/older workers discussing multigenerational benefitsHaving a wide diversity of ages in your organization comes with a lot of benefits. As with many other kinds of diversity, a wide range of generational representation is a driver of innovation, offering varied perspectives on issues by combining older generation’s specialist knowledge with younger professional’s innate understanding of modern technologies and changes. Benefits aside, a multigenerational workforce multiple generations represented in the workforce is a near unavoidable reality as baby boomers begin to step back from top-level positions.

But multi-generational workforces also come with their own challenges, including:

  • A wide range of values and beliefs can cause differences in priorities
  • Significantly disparate communication styles and preferences
  • Wide gaps in desired perks and benefits

Diverse Generations with Diverse Values

Differing perspectives and values means different needs, and what a young professional is looking for from their benefits package is vastly different from what more senior employees need; knowing the difference and being able to account for the diverse needs of multiple generations of employees is key to crafting an employee-centric benefits experience.

The benefits valued by older generations tend towards traditional cornerstones such as 401k matching and supplemental health insurance. Younger generations, such as Millennials and Gen-Z, tend to value wellness initiatives and benefits that give them time back in the day. But there’s a surprising degree of overlap between emerging benefits that workers of every age are pining for, such as flexible work options, training and development opportunities, and smaller, personalized perks, from shuttle services to discounts on dry-cleaning. 

The generation gap isn’t as steep as it might appear. When you get right down to it, it’s about people.  Your employees are distinct individuals with individual needs that simply can’t be standardized.

The Employee-Centric Benefits Experience

Fortunately, you don’t have to standardize at all. Instead, account for differences by focusing on benefits personalization. Employees of all ages agree that flexible work options that allow them to work on their own schedules are critical; and you can take your multigenerational benefits a step further by partnering with PerkSpot. Our breadth of potential savings is uniquely positioned to cater to diverse workforces, with thousands of discounts available across dozens of industries!  We offer meaningful benefits targeted at and personalized to the unique needs of every individual employee.

And that’s the core of an employee-centric benefits experience; offering the perks that each individual really cares about, no matter how unique! By focusing on perk personalization, you can provide an employee-centric experience. Personalized offerings will help celebrate the rich diversity of your workforce – generational or otherwise. From flexible work options to regular wellness initiatives, you’ll want to target your benefits around your workforce’s distinct concerns. As you do, PerkSpot can help get started with a benefits experience centered that’s unique to your equally unique employees; Request a Demo to learn more today!

PerkSpot Named Amongst The Fastest Growing Companies In Chicago

PerkSpot has been named to the 2022 Crain’s Chicago Business Fast 50 List for the third year in a row. Each year, over one hundred applications from a variety of industries are submitted. With only 50 making the cut as Chicagoland’s most rapid growing companies, competition is stiff. 

Founder and CEO, Chris Hill launched into the HR technology space when he founded PerkSpot in 2006. What began as a small company with a big vision has evolved into the successful PerkSpot that we know and love today. We continue to change the lives of employees at more than 1,000 businesses around the world, all with the goal to build a better place to work. Without a doubt, we are proud to be a thought leader in the human resources space, creating new and valuable ways for employers to provide financial wellness for over 20 million employees with an attitude of humility, generosity, and gratitude.

“As we continue to expand, it’s important to acknowledge that growing a business is by no means easy. We continue to learn important lessons and make exciting progress towards the goals we have set. Above all, none of it would be possible without each and every PerkSpotter.”

– Chris Hill

To see the full list of 50 companies in alphabetical order, visit Crain’s Chicago’s Business. 

Interested in being a part of the exciting growth? Visit our careers page to apply today.

3 Simmering Ways to Make this Summer Special

With temperatures rising and flowers once more in bloom, we’re all breathing a sigh of relief as we finally head out of winter. But it might be a surprise that Summer is just around the corner! Dust off that company grill and get a head start on summer plans at the office with these three tips from PerkSpot!

Sunglasses on Summer Sand

 

1) Normalize Vacations for your Employees this Summer Break!

What would Summer be without Summer Break? Remind your employees that it’s getting close to the best time of the year to kick back and take a break. Encouraging regular vacations is an excellent way of sponsoring a positive culture!

The warm weather is perfect for finally making use of saved-up PTO, so encourage employees to use their time off and managers to lead by example. If you do, you’ll see a healthier and happier workforce – especially with a discount program to help employees save on all their vacation needs! Travel and vacations are one area where PerkSpot can help employees save armloads. With savings on everything from the flight to the hotel to the restaurants, PerkSpot can make vacations stress-free. If you’re interested in hearing more of the benefits PerkSpot can offer to employees, sign up for a demo today!

 

2) Use the warm weather to encourage wellness initiatives!

Healthy employees are happy and productive employees – it’s no surprise that physically and mentaly healthy employees call in sick less and show improvements in both focus and productivity. So why not introduce some health and wellness programs now that it’s finally feeling good to get outside? Biking is a fun and healthy way to see the local neighborhood and even city in a whole new way. Why not take steps to encourage it as the weather warms up?

Try setting up a bike-to-work challenge, for instance! Offer employees rewards for taking healthy transportation options rather than car or bus. For remote workers, virtual meditation sessions or community exercise (yoga or pilates are perfect) can be a great way to encourage employees to get moving! By starting positive health initiatives during this summer, you can help fuel healthy living year-round in employees.  Healthy employees are happy employees, and you’ll see productivity  boons as a result!

 

3) Focus on building a community with regular Summer events!

Ultimately, you want your work environment to feel like a community. Warming temperatures mean the perfect time for challenge courses or outdoor barbeques! While in-person events can be a great bonding experience, always be sure to consider your remote teams as well. Incorporate regular virtual events into the calendar, so those working from home can be part of your company culture! From trivia nights to beach parties, there’s no shortage of community events that can spice up your schedule.

Planning summer socials can help bring your whole organization together, and create a feeling of solidarity between teams; not to mention how much fun you can have with it!  Hosting regular social gatherings, including virtual events, makes it much easier to maintain morale, especially amongst extra-motivated employees. Help cultivate a positive company culture while strengthening morale with some new event series this Summer!

This Summer is the perfect time to spice up your workplace with new events, healthy habits, and light-hearted socials. These help HR departments foster satisfied employees at both the enterprise and team level! With new social programs, encouraged vacations and an authentically upbeat attitude this summer, you can reduce turnover and encourage employee loyalty through the simplest means possible – making your organization an amazing place to work.

Faith & Spirituality Also An Important Part Of Workplace Inclusion

A unique calendar alignment has occurred this year that only takes place approximately every 33 years. Easter, Passover, and Ramadan have overlapped, bringing a convergence of reflections for these communities. To recognize this, the PerkSpot team came together to discuss. The focus was around how faith & spirituality influences who we are and how we work. Our conversations included personal stories and breakout sessions. Both designed to unlock conversation on a topic that is often ignored or overlooked in our workplaces. 

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 

Discussing faith and spirituality can be a daunting and sensitive topic. Our beliefs are a core part of our identity and employees feeling excluded or unrecognized can be detrimental. Faith & spirituality, whether observed or not, is often highly influential in informing who we are, the choices we make, the way we interact, our aspirations, and our values. When considering DEI efforts, we think you should find opportunities to affirm the important role that faith plays in how your employees contribute in the workplace.

Recognize Your Employees Beliefs 

It’s important to recognize and offer time away to practice each individual’s traditions and practices. Offering an open vacation policy or flexible scheduling allows employees to take the time to fully immerse in their practices. 

Nadir Mian, Graphic Designer at PerkSpot, shared, “At companies with a designated limit to PTO, some people have to use their vacation for their religious holidays whereas others have time off for their religious holidays built into their schedule. Although accommodating for every religious holiday may not be feasible, extra days on top of the allotted PTO time should be available to those who witness religious holidays that don’t fall under the traditional corporate holiday schedule.”

Another way to recognize your employees is by holding company-wide events or smaller breakout groups. It allows the opportunity to reflect, discuss, and participate in sharing personal stories when comfortable. We don’t advocate discussions that compare or contrast belief systems. But rather, allow employees to share how faith has influenced who they are, their life experiences, and what’s important to them.

We encourage you to use this unique overlap of traditions as a reminder to recognize your employees’ differences in beliefs. Offer a safe, open working space that allows for exploration and recognition.

Mayo Clinic Centralizes Their Discount Program

Mayo Clinic is home to 73,000 employees with major campuses located in Rochester, Phoenix, and Jacksonville, with smaller satellite locations across the country. As one of the top healthcare providers in the nation, patients from around the world travel to Mayo Clinic seeking top-notch care. With employees located in different regions, Mayo Clinic was in need of a discount provider that could bridge the gap in their discount offerings.

Prior To PerkSpot

Mayo Clinic previously had their own discount portal but it was a heavy lift to manage and had strict requirements. To be listed, vendors needed 3+ years as a business, 20% discounts or higher, and needed to commit to a year of service. This criteria made it difficult to secure offers and the management of the program was difficult. 

Conversely, PerkSpot manages the program for you with a team of client success managers ready to help. We devise engagement strategies, create marketing materials, and more. Additionally, Mayo Clinic’s previous discounts were based on their Rochester location making it difficult for employees elsewhere to benefit. 

“We wanted to not only have our employees at  Rochester have discounts, but everybody at Mayo Clinic to have discounts”, shared Betty Smith, Employee Purchase Program Coordinator. In 2015, Mayo Clinic made the decision to partner with PerkSpot. Since then, on average 11,500 employees have saved on a monthly basis. With a direct link from their employee intranet, the mobile app, and email communications, saving is easy. 

Decreased Turnover Rates

The healthcare industry has seen staggering turnover rates with 19.5% in 2021, a 1.7% increase from the previous year. HR Professionals are being challenged to improve employee morale and decrease employees leaving. In addition, rising inflation and wage pressures are only adding to the challenge. “By having PerkSpot, it gives us a competitive advantage over our competitors that don’t offer comparable discounts to their employees.” 

Supporting Local

One feature Mayo clinic has utilized is PerkSpot’s “Suggest a Business” tab to recommend local vendors. The suggest a business functionality is great for adding additional discount opportunities for our staff. The more the merrier.” One example Mayo Clinic suggested was a local nail salon in Rochester. Following the suggestion, our team secured an exclusive offer for employees to start utilizing in their discount portal. 

In addition to local discounts, employees are saving on hotels, groceries, events, and more. In 2022, Mayo Clinic’s most popular savings have included travel discounts along with savings on Apple products.

With the current environment and challenges over the past year, PerkSpot can be the solution you need to reduce turnover and set yourself apart. 

Dealing with Burnout as an HR Professional

In today’s competitive candidate market, life as an HR professional has never been quite so exhausting. Being forced to chase after candidates in the age of work from home and tremendous employee freedom has meant a difficult balancing act between providing appealing, top-quality benefits, managing cost efficiency, and negotiating employee concerns – all while dealing with the fallout of a global pandemic. It’s no wonder that burnout is skyrocketing at HR departments all over the country – but there is a better way. And with World Health Day officially starting today on April 7th, there’s never been a better time to help your department get physically and mentally healthy!

Burnout Business Woman Overwhelmed

42% of Human Resources teams report feeling overburdened with projects and responsibilities. And on one hand, this is something that should be taken up with management; when HR teams are simply too small or too overworked, there needs to be discussion about expanding Human Resources or offloading responsibilities. But a second, equally important aspect of this equation is learning to deal with burnout individually. And for that, we should first understand what “burnout” really means.

When we talk about burnout, we’re talking about the feelings of dread and exhaustion that rise up when we’re forced to do demanding, repetitive work. It’s the sense of doing tasks purely out of obligation, no longer believing they have any real impact. And the first step in re-gaining your passion is to re-gain control over your schedule.

Set Boundaries

The first step of assessing burnout is setting boundaries. It’s important both personally and professionally to be able to step away from work communications; for instance, turning off Slack and email past six-o-clock. Sticking to a routine that clearly separates work from life is fundamental to having a good work-life balance. Even if you’re on-call for emergencies, emergency should never mean every night, and if they are, then that’s a conversation you need to have with management.

Build Strong Communication Habits

Fostering good communication with management and the executive team at your workplace is another important aspect of managing burnout. That’s because burnout isn’t all about stress, but also lacking a sense of agency and value in what you do. When you feel you’re doing “meaningless” work, or don’t have control over your own schedule, burnout is far more intense. Prioritizing valuable work and setting firm boundaries on your own schedule is often a necessary step in managing burnout.

Break your Routines

More than boundaries, you’ll also want to start breaking your routines. While routines can provide a comforting sense of normalcy in our lives, they can also become trapping. If you notice you’re performing the same tasks in the same way over and over again, then it’s time to find something new. Maybe it’s as simple as switching up your morning routine, maybe it’s taking a new route around town, or maybe it’s shifting into a new aspect of your department’s operations.

Discover Personal Stress Management Solutions

Finally, there’s the most traditional (but still very important!) part of dealing with burnout – personal stress management. Exercise and meditation are the two most common methods, but it’s important to find what works for you; whether it’s walking your dog, paddling down canoe trails, or simply taking five dedicated minutes to focus. By understanding your stress and mentally moving on, you can take control back from your emotions.

Properly managing burnout requires breaking negative feedback loops, getting excited about work, and learning to manage stress. While that’ll require a lot of personal initiative, there are some tools that can help manage burnout stress.

One area you can cut down on stressful micromanagement is with PerkSpot’s single stop benefits platform, which offers countless diverse benefits for your diverse employees. With a suite of discounts at their fingertips, PerkSpot provides employees with the resources they need to cope with stress and burnout – whether it’s deals on ergonomic office chairs and gym memberships or complete getaway vacations to exotic destinations at a discount, schedule a demo today to learn more about the ways that PerkSpot can be a powerful burnout-burning resource for your organization this World Health Day.