The Benefits of a Unique Company Culture

There is a steady supply of people writing blog posts about how their unique working environment means they're hiring "A players" because of some combination of the following:

• They only have a four day work week
• They have a high intensity startup environment with exciting work
• Everyone has stock
• Everyone has a profit share
• 20% Time
• An onsite chef
• Everyone works from home
• The company loves open source and employees spend their spare time writing more of it
• Fussball Table
• Table Tennis Table
• The office is made anime figurines glued together to form a protective structure
• A masseuse
• Some kind of famous person
• Anything else someone has thought might be cool

It's great that these kind of benefits are being offered to employees. There's no doubt that these kind of benefits help employees feel that they're being valued. In many cases benefits like this will have a better payoff in motivation and happiness than a similar cash increase would. 

The problem with how these benefits are presented is that some companies have convinced themselves that their particular combination of benefits is going to lead to significantly happier and better employees than other companies have. They proceed to spread their new formula as hiring gospel, but this isn't an optimal approach to finding the best people for your company.

In the job market each potential benefit will be valued differently by different potential employees - some people love having a masseuse and others don't like to be touched.  That's a good, employers are dealing with the a market for employees and actually benefit from differentiating themselves. A niche offering appeals to those in a niche, you can get employees more affordably if their wants match a particular set of unique offerings than if you simply compete on price. 

Some of the benefits that could be offered are in opposition to each other and most organisations will only have the resources to select a few anyway. Instead of adopting whatever the latest fad in benefits is, a benefit package needs to be carefully crafted to target the particular people that the company wants to attract.


If a companies' benefits target the particular type of individuals the company wants to attract, for instance 20% time is a better benefit for attracting open source developers, then they'll act as a filter if you make it clear that the company values people who value these kinds of benefits. Over time the employee base will end up being those people who value the particular configuration offered by the company[1].

Many people like to talk about hiring A players, but A players aren't a static category. Potential A players generally have particular areas to which they're most suited. An A player in a bank is someone who can deal with massive system complexity and produce very high reliability software; An A player in a startup is someone that can deliver quickly on a wide array of potential changes in a short time frame. The best bank employee might be an experienced developer who would like evenings to spend with their kids and a decent set of health care benefits while the best startup employee might be more on the lookout for how many ways you can get stimulants into their bloodstream.

Instead of setting out to evangelize their set of benefits to other companies more companies should encourage a wide array of benefits and differentiation amongst companies. The worst outcome for a company would be to convince many employers in an area to adopt the same style as themselves.

This illusion of A Players all being recruited by a company's own special set of benefits is the cause of all the blog posts by different companies in the same area espousing completely different views on attracting A players. One company busily states that they only hire people with a certain level of passion to pour into the product while the other insists they get the best results by working four days a week and relaxing. If you're seeing both their blog posts then both companies are probably successful and both believe they've found the secret sauce to getting the best people. In reality, both are right. They just don't realize that they aren't competing on the same factors for new employees.

1. Behavioural psychology shows people will come to be unwilling to take offers that cause them to lose benefits they already have.