7 Inspiring Comp & Ben Examples to Use in 2024

7 Next-Level Comp & Ben Examples to Inspire You For 2024

‍

As you may have noticed, we’re all about fair pay and competitive benefits here at Figures. And with the end of the year approaching, we thought it would be nice to share a bit of inspiration for 2024. 

Below are seven companies of all different sizes, from all over the world, that all have one thing in common: they’re doing compensation and benefits right this year. 

Ready? Let’s go! 

‍

7 companies doing compensation and benefits right in 2023

‍

1. Buffer

When it comes to salary transparency, no one does it better than Buffer. The social media software company has published all of its salaries online since 2013. Buffer also publicly shares information about how those salaries are determined, which involves benchmarking for role and experience and then adjusting for one of two different cost-of-living bands. 

The company has even built a salary calculator so that anyone can find out what they’d earn at Buffer according to their role, experience and location — which is well worth having a play with if you’re looking for a new role.

Put simply, Buffer’s approach is all about being as transparent as possible about both the salaries they pay and how salary decisions are made. According to the company’s website, Buffer’s compensation philosophy comes down to four key principles: transparent, simple, fair and generous. 

Buffer has also shared that its unadjusted gender pay gap across the organisation is less than 1% — which is pretty good going if you ask us. 

‍

2. Butternut Box

Butternut Box is a fresh dog food subscription company with around 700 employees across the UK and Europe. Full disclosure: Butternut Box is also a Figures client, which means we already know they’re committed to fair and competitive compensation. 

And this commitment seems to be paying off: 86% of Butternut Box’s employees would recommend the company to a friend, and 88% approve of the CEO, according to Glassdoor. Butternut Box also recently shared that its mean gender pay gap for UK employees is 1.2% — significantly lower than the ONS-reported average of 8.3%.

And Butternut Box offers some pretty sweet benefits too, including a generous holiday allowance, plus four paid “paws” days per year to be used for wellbeing and/or learning. Employees in the UK and Ireland can even choose to work from abroad for up to 60 days a year. 

Each employee also gets a £500 budget for learning and development, and those with furry friends at home can enjoy a generous discount on a Butternut Box subscription. 

‍

3. Hubspot 

Hubspot is a CRM platform with about 6000 workers globally. They describe themselves as a ‘hybrid company rooted in flexibility’ — meaning that employees can choose to work remotely or at one of Hubspot’s 12 global offices. 

Hubspot is also committed to providing its employees with truly top-notch benefits. To start with the basics, Hubspot offers healthcare coverage including dental, medical and vision, and generous paid leave for new parents. Unusually, they also provide egg-freezing benefits for female employees. 

But the real magic is in their leave policy: Hubspot employees get unlimited vacation, and the company offers vacation quota relief (VQR) to ensure employees can actually take time off without worrying about hitting their targets. That’s in addition to a company-wide ‘week of rest’ in July each year, which the company introduced in 2021.

Plus, employees who have been at Hubspot for five years get a four-week paid sabbatical (and a bonus) to use as they choose — now that’s the way to reward employee loyalty! 

‍

4. Birdie 

Birdie is a healthtech company (and another Figures client) headquartered in London, with 160+ team members spread across 12 different countries. 

They offer an impressive range of benefits, including parental leave of up to 26 weeks at 100% pay for primary caregivers, and up to 12 weeks at 100% pay for secondary caregivers. Birdie also grants its employees 5 paid days of fertility leave to support them with the pressure of going through fertility treatments. 

And that’s not all: there’s a hefty personal development budget for each employee, and everyone gets 10 days of paid ‘wellbeing leave’ (in addition to the already generous sick leave package). 

Birdie’s holiday leave is also pretty great, with each employee getting 28 days’ leave plus bank holidays, and a freebie week off when the whole business shuts down over Christmas. Birdies even get to take their birthday off if it falls on a working day!

And when it comes to salaries, Birdie is proudly transparent: they list an exact salary or range on every job ad. 

‍

5. Aldi UK 

The global supermarket chain Aldi probably needs no introduction. But you might not know about its impressive credentials when it comes to pay and benefits — particularly for its in-store colleagues. 

Aldi UK say on their website that they are ‘committed to offering competitive pay and benefits’ — which certainly shows. As of July 2023, Aldi pays store assistants a starting salary of £12.85 in London and £11.40 per hour in the rest of the UK. This makes it the highest-paying UK supermarket, and one of only a handful of retail brands to pay over the National Living Wage. 

Aldi is also one of the only ‘big five’ supermarkets (alongside Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s) to pay workers during their breaks — which could be worth up to £972 per year for the average in-store worker. 

‍

6. Atom Bank 

Employees at UK-based digital ‘challenger bank’ Atom Bank get access to a number of attractive benefits. But the headline isn’t the private health insurance, flexible working or competitive annual bonus scheme — it’s the fact that employees only work 34 hours a week (for full-time pay).

The company introduced the four-day week back in November 2021, when they were the first UK bank (and the biggest UK company overall) to take part in a nationwide trial. 

And this novel approach has served the company well: a survey 10 months into the experiment found that 97% of employees looked forward to work. They also had a 49% increase in applications after making the switch. 

Atom Bank employees also get a minimum of 22 days per year plus bank holidays  — and remember, with the four-day week, that’s really 28. Each employee also has a £200 annual ‘All About Me’ fund to help them learn a new skill outside of their role. 

‍

7. Seer Interactive 

Finally, Seer Interactive is a digital marketing agency based in Philadelphia. The company’s founder and CEO, Wil Reynolds, made headlines a few years ago when he announced a new salary floor of $65K for all employees — even the office cleaning lady, according to one article.

Reynolds has reportedly turned down several lucrative offers for the company, choosing instead to reinvest in its employees. Other benefits they receive include profit sharing and share options — around 40% of Seer is owned by employees. 

Seer employees also get unlimited vacation, with a compulsory minimum of three weeks off to make sure that people actually use it. Seer also invests heavily in its employees’ learning and development: each employee has a $500 annual professional development budget, as well as access to books, conferences, classes and more. According to the company’s website, they’ve spent more than $37K on these resources in the last five years. 

There’s more: remote employees get a $400 stipend to help them set up a home office, and every new starter gets a week’s PTO before they start to give them time to recharge. 

‍

What can we take from these examples? 

‍

Every company is different. Not everyone can afford to have a generous minimum salary floor like Seer, and not everyone feels comfortable with 100% salary transparency like Buffer. 

Ultimately, each company needs to decide on the right benefits to offer its employees and build a compensation philosophy that works for them.

That said, there are some general principles that we can garner from the trailblazers we’ve talked about above. Here are a few key takeaways to keep in mind as you think about your own compensation philosophy and benefits programme:

1. Transparency around pay equity is key: According to a recent report from Josh Bersin, communicating clearly about pay equity is 13x more important for employee engagement and retention than bragging about high pay and great benefits. The data is clear: employees want to know that they’re being paid fairly. 
2. Investing in employees pays off: One thing that stands out from the list above? Many of these leading companies invest heavily in their employees’ learning and development.  And there’s evidence that this can have big results for a business: employers with strong learning cultures have engagement and retention rates that are 30–50% higher than those that don’t, according to Deloitte. 
3. Well-rested employees are happy employees: Whether it’s Hubspot’s company-wide week of rest, Atom Bank’s four-day week, or Seer’s generous vacation policy, the companies on this list understand one thing: employees need time away from work to be able to perform at 100% when they’re on the clock. 
4. A little flexibility can go a long way: If there’s one thing we’ve learned since 2020, it’s that the world won’t fall apart if employees aren’t working from your HQ. Most of the companies on this list grant their employees flexibility in how, where and even when they work. And this definitely pays off when it comes to retention: in a McKinsey report from 2022, 40% of employees listed flexibility as a top motivator for staying in their jobs.

‍

How Figures can help

‍

Want to see your organisation on a list like this in the future? Here’s the thing: benefits play a huge role in retaining and engaging your employees. But they won’t do anything at all if your salaries aren’t fair and competitive as well. 

And building a fair and equitable salary structure that will help you to attract and retain the best employees is impossible without accurate market data — that’s where we come in. 

Figures can give you access to real-time salary data from all over Europe, so you can effectively benchmark salaries and build the competitive compensation structure your employees deserve.

Want to learn more? Sign up for a demo to see Figures in action. 

‍