The Five Top Attributes of a Great On-Site Employee Perk

By Frank Mycroft, CEO at Booster
Booster is now offered as an employee perk at most of the Fortune 100 campuses within the geographic areas we serve. For those of you unfamiliar, Booster is the gas station that comes to you, at your office parking lot, and fills your tank while you go about your day. Prices are very competitive, and same-day delivery is free.
Given its popularity as an employee benefit, I am often asked by other amenity providers, large employers, and benefits managers, “What makes for a great on-site employee perk?”.
In no particular order, here are my thoughts.
1) Low or zero cost to employers. Perks that require substantial investment and funding from employers are much less likely to succeed, largely due to the complexity of decision making inside the organization. As Business Insider summarized, even at Google the vast majority of on-site perks are free to Google to offer. At Booster, we focus on affordability and are often able to offer our service completely free-of-charge to large employers within our geographic region.
2) Easy to manage. HR, Benefits, Facilities are corporate cost centers that tend to be overworked and understaffed. The first question we often get from an HR executive is how much overhead will be required to manage, maintain, and report on the service. By providing intelligent reporting and investing in strong client service teams, you can offer frictionless service that gives due credit to your clients. Make your customers heroes for their employees without requiring work and you will be a hero to them — one they want to help succeed.
3) Directly enhances productivity. Many perks paradoxically end up taking time away from employees. For instance, beauty services and massages are nice, but they typically require scheduling time away from being productive. Auto services that require employees to move their car before and after service also decrease at-work productivity. No one denies that these perks may have indirect productivity benefits, but such benefits can be abused (think abuse of Hooli perks in the show Silicon Valley). At Booster, we provide our service to all open parking areas, so employees can follow their normal routine. We obsess over keeping the metric of “how many seconds are required to use our service” as low as possible.
4) Taking advantage of existing, underutilized real estate. Many office campuses have fixed cost property such as parking lots, executive training centers, or cafes that are underutilized during portions of the day or week. On-site vendors that take advantage of these underutilized resources can offer a true win-win for their customers and their bottom line. At Booster, we quietly roam parking lots during the mid-day, providing gas delivery in a manner that leverages existing real-estate and reduces road congestion during commute times.
5) Usable by most, if not all, employees. The amount of internal conflict a new perk will cause is inversely correlated to how many employees can use the perk. Particularly if the offering is not free to the employer. Offering costly bus transport to the city? Expect employees to ask for transport to/from other locations. Offering free daycare? Expect employees to ask to bring their pets to work, too. Offering EV charging? If employees start asking for gas delivery on-site, message me.
Do you have other ideas about what makes the best perks? If so, I would love to hear in the comments below!
