Top companies are promoting perks like student-debt relief instead of Ping-Pong and nap pods, and job seekers are taking notice
- LinkedIn released its annual ranking of "Top Companies" that employees want to work for.
- Many companies on the list are emphasizing bringing personal and social value to employees, rather than luxurious in-office perks.
- Companies around the country are following suit by purposely skipping ping-pong tables to allow employees a better work-life balance.
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Companies lured prospective employees with in-office nap pods, soccer fields, and spa treatments might soon turn into a thing of the past.
Instead of in-office perks like nap pods and spa treatments, companies are starting to use corporate vales to appeal to prospective employees.
LinkedIn released its annual "Top Companies" ranking for 2019, which analyzes the corporations job hunters want to work for the most. The ones that made the list this year tended to emphasize specific values, such as social programs or generous benefits, over perks, LinkedIn found.
Disney and Lyft, for instance, began offering employees benefits to combat student debt and mental illness: Disney offers to pay full tuition even for part-time workers, and Lyft began offering free behavioral therapy to employees and dependents. Other companies in the ranking began promoting social responsibility: Slack is teaching incarcerated people to code to help them get tech jobs after prison, while WeWork banned meat in cafeterias to minimize its environmental footprint.
Read more: 19 of the best job perks and benefits millennials have that their parents didn't
Companies around the country are moving towards a value-focused model to appeal to employees. Digital design and technology agency Work & Co purposely skipped the Ping-Pong tables and game consoles to encourage workers to leave on time.
The trend is relatively new among businesses: the number of executives who said they see "taking responsibility for societal issues" as something that will impact their organizations nearly doubled since last year, according to human resources consulting firm Mercer.
Employees themselves told Business Insider that company benefits offer more value to them than free food. "While people are expected to drive hard, they aren't expected to sacrifice personal or family time," an employee said about her company, Pegasystems, which had one of the best company cultures of 2018. "The company even makes time in the workday for diversity discussion groups."