Dream Job/Dream Benefits

An offer you can’t refuse

Emad Ibrahim
2 min readOct 14, 2013

I know that sometime in my future,hopefully sooner than later, I will have my own company. I put a lot of thought into culture and one aspect of this is a KILLER benefits package. Simply because I want to have employees that LOVE coming to work. Not “like” or “really like” but “LOVE”.

I used to be an idealist but now I am more of a pragmatist and I know some of these benefits might be very utopian and not financially doable. What do you think of these benefits? Pros? Cons? Other benefits you would like to have?

Quick List of Benefits

  1. Paid/catered lunch
  2. 4-weeks vacation
  3. Build your own computer
  4. One paid vacation per year for you and your family i.e. we pay for everything
  5. 4-day work week
  6. No overtime
  7. Paid college for children
  8. Life insurance — 100% paid by company
  9. Health, dental and vision insurance — 100% paid by company
  10. Retirement account with matching 1-to-1

Details

Here is my thinking behind each of these benefits.

Paid Lunch

Saves people time and money. I bet 1.5 hours are wasted everyday on lunch form time to decide where to go, driving or ordering, eating, etc… This saves the company time and saves you effort and time. So you can go home early — win-win.

4-weeks Vacation

No rollover and you must take at least one week a year. Happier employees are more productive

Build Your Own Computer

I care a lot about what computer I use and everyone is different. Why give them a cookie-cutter Dell or macbook.

Paid Vacation

The company will pay for a 1-week vacation for you and your family. Paid = flight, hotel, food and pocket money. There will probably be some limits set on this. Maybe $10k per vacation or something reasonable.

4-Day Workweek

I am more productive and generally happy when I have a 3-day weekend and I am pretty sure others would enjoy that.

No Overtime

Unless you are working with life threatning situation or some hard deadline then there is absolutely no need to make your employees stay late or work on the weekend. That helps no one. By “hard deadline”, I don’t mean made-up deadlines by management that mean very little in the grand scheme of things.

Paid College for Children

I am pretty sure with this kind of benefit, you will have ZERO turnover. If it costs you $100k over 10 or 15 years of the the employee’s tenure, that’s nothing in the big picture. It will cost you more to replace people and you lose all the experience and domain knowledge. You can add limits such as 2-children max, 4-years of college, in-state only, etc. Paying for everyone to go to Harvard could get very expensive.

Insurance

I find it ridiculous that an employer doesn’t want to pay the extra couple of hundred dollars to cover the full cost of insurance.

YOUR Dream Benefits?

What are benefits that you would love to see in you dream job/company?

Unlisted

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Emad Ibrahim

Husband, Father of Twins, Published Author, Entrepreneur, Passionate Technologist, Programmer and Productivity Nut. more at https://about.me/eibrahim