Rich Girl Roundup: Which Job Benefits Are Actually The Most Valuable?

Katie: Welcome back, Rich Girls and Boys, to the Rich Girl Roundup weekly discussion of The Money with Katie Show. I'm your host, Katie Gatti Tassin, and every Monday morning we are gonna dig into an interesting money discussion. But before we do, here's a quick message from the sponsors of this segment.

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Katie: All right. So before we get into it, this week's upcoming main episode is about the costs of infertility and the options that someone has when they're trying to start a family in a more nontraditional way. It's actually a pretty complex topic that I knew very, very little about before we developed the episode. So I'm really excited to share it with you and I hope you find it very helpful and potentially shareable, but okay, onto the Roundup. Henah, how you doing today? 

Henah: I'm good. You could see in the background, I have lots of packing boxes 'cause we're in the process of moving, and this'll be you, I think, in three weeks behind me, maybe? 

Katie: Yeah, about a month. We're getting pretty close. Yeah, it's a busy time over the summer 

Henah: And our audio engineer’s moving. It's a big time for life change. And so this move all coincides with taking paid time off, and we're covering infertility on the show this week. So I thought it'd be really interesting for us to talk through, what are our ideal company benefits? So this is something that you and I have talked about internally quite a bit. Something that I've personally thought a lot about. So I have a lot that I'm gonna say on this topic, I think. So I'm happy to give my overview and then Katie, I can ping it to you. 

Katie: Yeah, I think the only thing that I'll call out before we get started is that obviously Henah and I are both employees of Morning Brew, post Money with Katie acquihire in January 2022. So we both were like, let's just make sure to clarify that we're talking about this broadly and that we're not commenting on the Morning Brew benefits, which are actually pretty dang good. 

Henah: They're amazing. 

Katie: Just a little disclaimer there that this is not intended to be reflective of the benefits that we personally have, 'cause I know we both had several different employers at this point. So I'd say we have a good smorgasbord of experiences with different types of benefits. 

Henah: Yeah, I would definitely say that Morning Brew is very generous. The benefits are really comprehensive, and that was actually the first thing that I was gonna say, is that I feel like my quality of life has vastly improved because of the benefits that Morning Brew has. And so for me personally, I actually took a course in college, it was called Results-Oriented Work Environments, ROWE, I dunno if you've heard of that. But basically the idea was that instead of having people work a nine to five, it was basically if you get everything done that you need to do, do it on your own time, do it asynchronously, do it whenever feels good, and then that's all we expect from you. And that's something that I've thought about a lot since then, because we also spend, what did you say, Katie? Like 40% of our lives at work? 

Katie: I think it was 36% of your waking hours are spent working. 

Henah: Which is pretty crazy. We're putting a lot of time and effort into our own roles. So the idea of company benefits and being comprehensive is really important to me. And I think there was that era of like WeWork, where it was ping pong tables on site and free booze and this and that, which I've worked in a WeWork; that was fun but it wasn't making this meaningful difference in my life. So I think we could start there. Katie, I know there are sort of like traditional company benefits and I think you have beef with unlimited PTO, so I wanna hear your thoughts on this one. 

Katie: Yeah, so this is, I know this is a hot topic in the benefits world. My beef with unlimited PTO is that I think it's a misnomer, because it's not actually unlimited. Clearly there is a point at which if you took enough, someone from HR would be knocking on your door being like, okay, that's too much. So my perspective is that I think the best way to structure PTO is to give people meaningful parameters to work within. I think when you have no boundaries, what I worry about, and not saying that I've seen this in our situation, but I've heard stories, I've seen plenty of dialogue about the topic, that people don't know, they're either taking too much or not enough. Maybe if you're just working on projects where if you're not working on it, it doesn't impact anyone else. Like you just have a deadline. Okay, well, in that case it doesn't really matter how much time you take off as long as the project gets done. But in other work environments, if you are not doing your job, someone else is probably having to step in and do it for you while you're out.

And so I think if there are weird feelings about someone taking too much or not enough, that it can kind of affect team morale. So my thought is, wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of generous PTO policy. It could be seven weeks a year, eight weeks a year, that is up to you to use. But that gives somebody who does want to take a lot of time off plenty of time, but they know what the upper limit is so they don't have to feel weird about, is this too much? Ooh, but I just took time off not that long ago, and so and so else on my team hasn't taken it in months. You're not kind of feeling funky about it 'cause everyone has the same amount, and then if you don't take it by the end of the year there could be some sort of…'cause maybe some people just don't wanna take that much vacation. I just think that some people tend to not want to do that. Then you have the option to either roll it over at the end of the year so that you're accruing it year over year, and you could take a much longer break in the future when the time serves you, or you could have the option to cash it in. Which I think could be kind of interesting, where it's like, oh, I'm not gonna take it with me to the next year but I'd rather just get paid out my hourly rate for those hours and get some sort of bonus. 

I think there are probably downstream negative impacts that you'd have to think through of people not taking the time off 'cause they're trying to make more money, so there'd have to probably be ways to go around that, but I think it kind of helps level the playing field and gives more healthy, helpful boundaries around what's actually appropriate, and might actually encourage people to take more than just like, I don't know, whenever you want, it doesn't matter. It's like, there's clearly actually a limit. 

Henah: I think at a high level I agree with you that having some sort of minimal baseline is really important. I've seen a couple companies do that. I think for me, maybe it evolves, like you can only roll over this much or cash out this much time to sort of balance it between people. My mother-in-law, she accrued like 50 days of PTO, which if she were to take all of that in a year would also be kind of hard. That's like 10 weeks, that's almost three months of PTO if she were to take it. And I think that that could be a little bit hard to balance to take all in one long sabbatical, essentially, unless it's more largely approved. But I think that that makes a ton of sense. And I think also from an HR perspective, I've seen a lot of companies who give unlimited PTO but they're only doing it as a way to not have to pay out cash for folks who don't use the time when they leave.

Katie: Yep. Bingo. 

Henah: So I think that's another thing to consider, and I'm not saying that companies who do that are doing it for that reason, but I have seen stories of that. So yeah, that's a big one. The other thing…I know we're probably gonna get into some conflict here, but I would love 100% remote work, which is what we currently have, and I love it. And I think that you can have the option to go in if you want, but I know this return to office thing for me personally, and I think Katie, you can attest to this, I am way more efficient when I am able to work remotely than when I'm in an office with other people, and obviously there are…

Katie: It's true. She is so distractible. I've seen this woman in office, and she is… 

Henah: I'm sorry, I just, I do love some social time. 

Katie: I'm kidding. 

Henah: But like… 

Katie: Yeah, I'm kidding. 

Henah: There is just such a difference between being able to choose when to go in and times where we need to go in and it feels worthwhile, and then feeling like, well, actually I can do a lot more, I save a lot more money by not commuting. I don't have to pay for a dog sitter, like that kind of thing as well. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that one. 

Katie: Totally agree. I think that if the nature of your work is such that being in person is really going to meaningfully impact…I worked on a team right before the pandemic started where we were doing design sprints together for user experience designs. Those are very hard to do remotely and it really hurt our productivity as a team, because the collaborative parts of our jobs were just, we just really gelled better in person and it was a hard transition, for sure. But I think that when I've seen teams that do have some sort of in-office requirement, what I've seen work well is having it be the same days of the week, or where teams are coming in…it's like, okay, this team is in office on Tuesdays, so they have their meetings, they do their collaboration. Anything that's easier to do in person, they all do then, because what I saw happening and what I had heard from friends was, “Hey, I'm going into the office 'cause we have to be here two days a week, but no one else is in the office on the days I'm here.” So it's, you're really not getting the benefit of being together. 

Henah: Yeah. We did that at my last job, where we all came in on a Wednesday; we all also had lunch together so it was like a team bonding situation. The other thing to think about was for me to be able to do that, because I was more remote, I had to drive a hundred miles each way to be able to come in every week. So I think there's also the commute option or being sort of up-front with employees, of if we expect you to come in at any point, we recommend living within X distance or planning for some sort of travel accommodations that you're comfortable doing regularly. 

Katie: Yeah, and it's tough, too, because I can see why employers feel like they're in a hard spot if they hired somebody with the expectation that they were gonna be there five days a week, and now it's post-pandemic remote work world, where that employee is now saying, “But I don't wanna come in anymore,” because if your original employment contract was an expectation that you agreed to that you're gonna be there five days a week, and now you don't wanna go in at all, that is kind of a tough situation to work through.

I think this is something that is much, much easier to negotiate as part of a new offer than to walk back with an employer where you previously were going into the office all the time. I think you're gonna have a much better chance of securing a benefit like that if you're negotiating it up front, versus once you're already on their payroll. 'Cause I think you have a lot less leverage then. 

Henah: A hundred percent. I think I saw some headlines of people being told “You have to come back,” and they were like, “Okay, well, I quit, I'm gonna find something else, because that is my priority.” 

Katie: It's definitely made my life a lot easier. It's hard just having a dog, honestly. That's the main reason. Anytime I have to travel for work, it's hundreds of dollars in boarding fees, dog expenses, like just to have her taken care of during the day, whether it's pets or children or other obligations that you have at home.

Henah: I was gonna say, we haven't gotten even to the childcare piece of this yet. 

Katie: Yeah, okay. So let's talk childcare. I wanna actually toss something out there, because I think one thing that I think is really, really cool that some employers do is offer on-site free childcare. 

Henah: Yeah. 

Katie: And it's like high quality, good childcare that is at your place of employment so that if you are going in, you're not even having to make an extra trip. And that is such a valuable perk. It's almost hard to put a price on it, both from the actual economic value of childcare but also the convenience factor of knowing that if you wanna go check on them in the middle of the day, you can. If you wanna go get them and have lunch with them, you can. That just I think is one of those things that is gonna become even more valuable as the return to work continues. It's gonna set employers apart. 

Henah: Yeah. There was a list of companies whose benefits I really admire, and there was one that offers on-site childcare and they're called FreeFrom; they're an organization that partners and works with intimate partner violence survivors and gets their financial wealth up to speed, helps them become financially independent from whatever situation they're coming from, et cetera. But for their employees as well, they offer on-site childcare, and a lot of the employees are survivors. And I think that that is just so valuable, and it's kind of this unquantifiable benefit but also a quantifiable benefit where you can say, well. I would've spent X on childcare, so I can take a little bit less salary because I'm gonna make more net at the end of the month.

Katie: Yep. My net pay will be higher. Totally. And there's, I assume there's probably at some scale, it's cheaper for the employer, too, to provide childcare to a certain number of kids and I think that it could be tough. There's probably different age ranges and I'm sure the logistics of that are very complicated. But to your point, I know there are companies that are doing this so it's obviously possible; it's just a function of, do you wanna invest the up-front money to make it happen? But I do think that if you are offering that competitive of a benefit, I'm sure there are lots of parents that would be like, yeah, I don't need to be paid at the top of the salary range 'cause I'm still making more overall than I was when I had to pay for childcare out of pocket.

Henah: Absolutely. And I imagine that the retention rate of less turnover because people are more invested, and they say “Oh, I feel really well taken care of and my kids are too, in the time that I'm working.” Yeah, I 100% agree. Which also makes me think about, we’re gonna talk about this on the show, fertility benefits and healthcare coverage. I know that you have a unique perspective on employer-sponsored healthcare, so I wanna hear about it. 

Katie: Yeah, to me it's one of those things where in the current system that we're in, I think an employer kind of has to provide it, but I have beef with the employer-sponsored healthcare model in general. I think tying healthcare to employment is just cruel. Because it means that if you lose a job, then, oh, not only do you not have income, you also don't have healthcare, so you better hope nothing happens to you. It's just kind of a dystopian way to structure society, I think. When you look at the numbers and you look at the economies of scale that could be achieved by a universal healthcare system or something that is federally or run at the state level, it actually is better for the employers too, because it's so expensive to provide health insurance to employees and the costs go up every year. They far outpace inflation. I think anyone that has to pay for their own health insurance probably knows that. But we even got a message earlier this year that's like, “Oh, the costs of whoever our insurance provider is…” 

Henah: Went up over 10%. 

Katie: It went up by 10%. So, you know, “Your costs are gonna be the same, employees. We are gonna be covering the difference." But I do think that that means higher costs for employers, which is obviously not good—hurts hiring, and lower wages for workers, because the money that they would've just paid directly to you is being considered part of your benefits package when they're paying $15,000 a year for you to have healthcare. So just horribly inefficient, economically speaking. 

Henah: My husband and I have been through layoffs, which we've talked on the show about before, but when we had to pay out of pocket for those months that we didn't have coverage through work, we're talking hundreds of dollars for literally the worst possible healthcare. And then of course the irony of like, well, your dental is different and your eyes are different and…it's all the same. I don't really understand, but…

Katie: “These bones on your face are insured separately.” 

Henah: Yeah. And you're on your own if you really want any of that. So yeah, I 100% agree. I have two other things that I want to talk about that I think are a little bit more related to money and salary, and then the amount of time that you're working. So for money and salary, this might be a hot take, okay. So bear with me. But I think that there should be minimum salary levels set at a business that is well above the living wage if you can afford to do that. This might be crazy, but I think that minimum salaries for your cost of living, for example in New York, should be like $75,000. And if you cannot provide that, then you are probably not ready to hire an employee. And I'm going to now shield my face from I think what people might get mad about. 

Katie: I'm actually happy you brought up this can of worms, because I'm curious…you mentioned the phrase “living wage.” So to preface, I do think that there is probably a level at which a minimum salary for a company that makes over a certain amount of revenue makes sense. But what to you is a living wage? How do you calculate a living wage and how do you determine what a minimum viable standard of living is in a given city? 

Henah: Yeah, I think it comes down to, what is the cost of shelter for at least a one- or two-bedroom space, depending on your needs as a family? What are the average costs of childcare? Like the things that are non-negotiable: gas, food, things like that. When you take all of that into account, what is that, plus a healthy buffer for savings and retirement and all of that, and what does that equal? I mean, obviously, we can get a lot more into the weeds with these numbers, but I just think that generally from my own anecdotal experience, making anything less than $60,000–$70,000 in New York was near impossible to save anything on, or to even get by month to month, or I was much more close to catastrophic financial impact. 

Katie: Mm. That's interesting. 

Henah: I think a lot of it is your own responsibility, but I do think to a general point you should be able to comfortably be able to live. 

Katie: My only concern with doing something like that at scale is those second and third order effects of, okay, if I am paying an employee not by the value that they're bringing or the value of the role that I'm hiring them for, but based on their own expenses, I think you would start to see discrimination against parents or people with disabilities. Anyone whose cost of living is gonna be higher. I could see that manifesting as well. I'm gonna hire a single 22-year-old and not a 40-year-old with two kids because the minimum viable cost of living is lower for that person. So I principally agree. I just think that implementing something like that would be really tricky to avoid those types of biases in practice.

Henah: I guess what I'm saying is, I don't expect someone hiring to be like, “For this specific person they get this salary because this is their cost of living.” I think what I'm saying is just across the board, all employees should be able to feasibly X, Y, Z. 

Katie: That makes sense. 

Henah: That's kind of where I draw the line. And then I think the other piece of this, which you and I have talked about, Katie, and you talked about it in an episode recently, is this idea of employee ownership and stock programs and profit-sharing. I think that this is a growing business model and I think that it really, really provides that sense of accountability and responsibility towards a shared goal, but also makes the employee feel like they're getting their value out from their employer for whatever profit they're reaping. So I'd be curious what you think about that as well. 

Katie: I love employee ownership programs. I think profit-sharing is really, really smart. There are some small businesses in Dallas that I knew of that did this in the fitness realm, where the owner of the studio profit-shared with her instructors and the quality of people she was able to retain because of that? Really high. And I totally think it's one of those things where it might look net more expensive at first, but I think the long-term benefits you reap as a business owner are really, really substantial. Because to your point about retention, I think it's a good way to start to wean the American economy and middle-class wealth off of property values and home ownership, because at this point that's the only way that your normal middle-class person gets equity in anything, if they're not investing in the stock market, is through having a home. And I think if they could start to build equity in the businesses they work for and through their own labor and what they're spending the majority of their time doing anyway, I think that that's a really cool way to potentially shrink the wealth gap over time. 

And when I say wealth gap, I'm referring to the gap between the working class and the 1%. I think that it could help employees share in the gains of the corporations or the businesses they work for and not just share in the downsides, which in my mind is like, if your company does poorly, you might get laid off. So you are sharing the risk—you're sharing the downsides, you carry the loss. So you should probably also benefit from when things are going really well. 

Henah: Amen. And also we were talking about this in an episode about MrBeast and how he reinvests all of his profits from videos into new content. And I think that's also what you're essentially doing, right? You're investing in the talent that you have and reinvesting those profits, ideally with the idea that the person will stay, the longer and better that the business grows. 

Katie: You know what's crazy, is there is a business, I think it's Mozilla. You know Mozilla? 

Henah: Like the Firefox? 

Katie: Yeah. I have a friend that works for them and she was telling me that she has the best work-life balance. She makes a ton of money. I think she works in sales and I might be totally butchering this, but it basically sounds like they are technically a not-for-profit company so everything they make has to be reinvested in the people in the business. And so all of their salaries are really high. And I was like, that is so interesting. I didn't even know that that was a thing that a big corporation could do. It's not like they're a nonprofit in the sense that they're a philanthropic organization. I'm sure they do some philanthropy, but because they're reinvesting everything into their people. She was like, “Yeah, my job rocks, I will never leave this company.” 

Henah: And that's on my new job application. Just kidding. Just kidding.

Katie: I know. Henah's gonna go apply to Mozilla. 

Henah: No, no. 

Katie: I could be wrong about the details there, but that was from what I recall. It was like, whoa, that's a really interesting concept to be like, oh employees before shareholders. Who would've thought? 

Henah: Wow, what a concept. And then I have one last concept that we can introduce. So I guess I'll preface by saying that Katie and I do have relatively flexible working hours. There are a lot of times that we're working sort of asynchronously, but I love the idea of the four-day workweek with that flexibility involved as well. And I'm gonna pass it over to you 'cause I think you have a much more nuanced take on this, outside of me just being like, better work life balance! 

Katie: Haha. Yeah. I always joke, this is gonna sound so bad, but I was joking with my friend Ben who owns a small startup that his venture funded and he goes, “Man, you don't realize how much of a capitalist pig you are until it's your ass on the line and you are the one that has to deliver the results.” And I do think there's something to that. 'Cause I think before Money with Katie, when I was working for big corporations—and we're talking tens of thousands of employees—I was like, oh my gosh, a four-day workweek is so manageable. We have 200 people in this department or on this team, and there is not enough work for every person to be working 40 hours a week. We could easily just be more efficient. 

Henah: What a concept. Not enough work? 

Katie: I know. Well, it was, we could easily be doing 32 hours, we were spreading it out over eight hours a day, five days a week. But we easily could have just really tightened things up and done it in four eight-hour days and done Fridays off or Mondays off, whatever. And I think it would've worked pretty well and been good for everybody. But now, in the position I'm in to run this business and to have certain goals, the idea of only working four days a week, I'm like, oh my god, how would we…I mean, I work seven days a week so I'd…not eight hours every single day, but I just don't know how people do that. And I think that that is definitely the trick of either having more employees and more people working on it so that the work is spread out amongst more people. But I definitely think for the goals that we have, the amount of people we have working on those goals and just the caliber of work we're holding ourselves to, I have a hard time imagining how we would get down to four days a week. But it is a goal of mine to get us there.

Henah: Yeah, I think that's definitely fair. We are a pretty nascent business so there's a lot that we wanna be doing and in the rocket trip trajectory, we're in the middle of it, so it feels hard to be like, “And I'm gonna pause and take off a whole Friday every week.” But I do think that it is certainly a shared goal between the two of us to have really great work-life balance. 

Katie: It’s a North Star for sure. 

Henah: Yeah, feeling like you're very present at work and that you're unplugged when you're not. I do also wanna talk about company retirement accounts, because that is sometimes the only valuable way you can compound your growth towards retirement. And I have seen, being sort of in nonprofit media like startup-y environments when that has not been offered at all and how much further I fell behind because that wasn't an option, and how I've been able to sort of like super accelerate that now that I'm here. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on company retirement accounts and providing either access to a 401(k) or even matching above that? 

Katie: Oh, yeah. Well, I think my perspective is informed by that shift from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans.

Henah: The pension to the 401(k). 

Katie: Yes. I think it's, I don't wanna say it's a nonnegotiable, but it's kind of a nonnegotiable to me. If you have over a certain number of employees, whether it's a simple 401(k) or simple IRA, whatever that other one is that has the lower limit, I think you should have to offer something, because like you said, there's really no other way for someone to get that many tax-deferred or Roth dollars put aside. And if they're employed by you in a W-2 capacity and they don't get that option, then they also can't go get a solo 401(k) unless they have other income from somewhere else. So I think it is actually quite limiting to not at least give someone the ability to contribute to one. 

And beyond that, I think another way to fix it that wouldn't put the onus on employers would just be to increase the limit for an IRA that anyone with income can open to the same thing as a 401(k). That way if you are employed by someone who doesn't offer one or you're in some other sort of situation, you're still not being limited by that $6,500 while your buddy down the block with an employer who does give them a 401(k) can put away $22,500.

So I think that that's potentially another solution, but it does kind of feel like it wasn't fully fleshed out or thought through when they were determining the defined contribution plan system of retirement savings, that there's those types of discrepancies.

Henah: Or that it's backwards, where they assumed, yeah, of course employers will offer this and then some employers were like, nope. So I do think that it's something where if you're going to hire someone at a W-2 level, it feels like the right thing to do to provide at least accessibility to those things. 

Katie: Yeah. And ideally without really crazy high fees. I know that there are some 401(k) plans where the fees are just bananas. And I think if you are an employee of a company that does not provide you the ability to contribute to one, going to HR and having it in writing that you're requesting it, you'll hear this in the full episode about the benefits request process, but the gal that's joining us worked in benefits for a corporation and she said that it was really helpful when employees would come and ask for things, because it allowed them to make that case to their superiors or approvers, whoever was giving them the ability to do it. That hey, look, our employees really want this. It was easier to get those things passed. So I think it's definitely worth asking for if you don't have one but you do like your employer. 

Henah: Because it also bleeds into the company culture. It bleeds into attitudes, it bleeds into retention. These are all things that are interconnected. 

Katie: Yeah, there are serious bottom line impacts based on these decisions, I think. So it's not all…I think when you talk about company benefits, it can almost feel a little squishy or touchy-feely. But I do think that the proof is kind of in the pudding, especially with, I used to work for Southwest and they had great benefits and a really good corporate culture, and they're the only airline that's been profitable, up until the pandemic, for all 47 years or whatever. And a big part of it, I think, is just the culture that the founder imbued it with, which was, we put our employees first, our customers second, and our shareholders third. I think when you skew too far in the other direction, you kind of start to shoot yourself in the foot. So…

Henah: Cool. 

Katie: That's all for this week's Rich Girl Roundup. Thanks for listening to us discuss all the philosophical goodness of the importance of employer benefits, and we will see on Wednesday to talk about the cost of infertility. Bye.