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Is your boss flying you to Ibiza this weekend for the closing parties? No? Then it’s time to move to an office with benefits, says Phoebe Luckhurst
By PHOEBE LUCKHURST | Published: 30 September 2014
Briefly, during the heady, bright-eyed naivety of the back-to-school period, you reckoned you loved your career. R.I.P misguided fervour. It’s almost October, which is essentially November, which is basically like January (December is a cheerful anomaly). Now morale has soured — and you’re calculating whether you’ve put in the groundwork (three days of extravagant faux-sneezes) to pull a sickie.
If you worked at Virgin you’d just go on holiday. Last week Richard Branson announced he’d be introducing an unlimited holiday policy, inspired by the one in place at Netflix.
It’s the perkplace: incentivising Londoners with treats and indulgences not offered in your average open-plan drone factory. Here are some of the ways offices are playing ball.
SEE YOU NEXT MONTH
At Pact, a Fairtrade coffee subscription start-up in Bermondsey, unlimited holidays was a founding principle. “It’s been part of our working philosophy for a long time,�? explains Joshua Lachkovic, a marketing executive there. “We’ve all been in companies where you feel guilty asking for holiday, and Pact wanted to ensure that it never felt like that.�?
It’s a gesture of trust — bosses are confident that the policy won’t be abused. It also enforces a flexible and more balanced culture. At MVF, an award-winning customer acquisition business based in Kentish Town, employees can take two “duvet days�? per year — letting their manager know on the day that they’d rather stay bedbound. “We look at this more holistically than just a ‘holiday’ policy,�? offers Nikhil Shah, the co-founder of Shoreditch-based start-up Mixcloud. “It’s flexible working; working from home, working remotely and no tracked holidays.�?
WORK OUT THOSE KNOTS
Some perkplace treats are physical —focusing on the body so that the mind (and company accounts) take care of themselves. Brighton-based ergonomics evangelist Posture People offers desk-based massages: employees pay a tenner and the company covers the rest. Vanity Fair staffers do a punishing menu of circuits with Steve Mellor from Freedom2Train every Wednesday to keep them spry. Paramount flirts with new-age fun, offering free massages or reflexology each month.
FESTIVAL SEASON
For many, summer equals a terse stand-off with colleagues as you all protest that you booked to go to a festival first and thus are more deserving of the time off to get mashed. To preclude squabbles, some offices put on their own festivals (get mashed with the boss instead).
Communications firm Golin organises a festival fired up by live acts and copious booze; at PR and marketing firm Octopus Group, the extravaganza is called Roctostock. “We gather in a field with our tents and camping gear,�? explains Phoebe Scott, an account executive there. “Celebrations begin with beer, a live band and BBQ. We stay the night, wake up to a bacon sandwich and head back to the office.�?
PARTY TIME
The clichéd off-site bonding takes place in a Holiday Inn in Slough. Someone gets pissed and paints the walls in vomit; on the menu are Seventies vol-au-vents and misery. Not in a perkplace: international money-transferring service Azimo has run off-sites in Barcelona, Hamburg and Ibiza. Old Street start-up Big Data Partnership landed at Gatwick on Monday after a weekend in Guernsey; and at the more glamorous end, MVF CEO Titus Sharpe is taking his staff to Ibiza this week for the season’s closing parties. At top advertising firm M&C Saatchi, there’s a highly subsidised bar that heaves with giddy ad execs on Thursday evenings.
Want work to work for you? Get yourself into a perkplace.
This article originally appeared at London Evening Standard. Please visit to read the full article.
Posted on September 30, 2014 in In The Press
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