Written by Turiya Gray

Turiya Gray is a dynamic HR executive with 20+ years of experience building workplaces where people and performance actually thrive. Turiya is obsessed with making work better for everyone and known for her sharp insights, impactful leadership, and passion for helping organizations get people and culture right. She is also the cohost of the top-rated HR unConfidential podcast that launched in 2018. Currently, Turiya serves as Senior Partner & Fractional Chief People Officer at FXG Partners, partnering with midsize companies to deliver thoughtful, high-impact HR leadership.

Connect with Turiya on LinkedIn.

I’m sure many of my HR friends remember what was happening in the workplace in summer 2021: COVID uncertainty, remote-work fatigue, burnout everywhere. Employee well-being had officially shifted from “nice to have” to “business critical,” and the Great Resignation was prompting every company to rethink how they attracted, retained, and meaningfully supported their people.

I stepped into the Chief People Officer role at a 300-person HR technology software firm in the midst of this “unprecedented time” with all things Total Rewards at the top of my priority list. While our long-term work included building a clear rewards philosophy, modernizing compensation, and evolving benefits, I quickly realized we had a more immediate opportunity: our employee perks.

Like many companies, we offered perks that were well-intentioned but we questioned whether they were the right investments for our people. So instead of tweaking around the edges, we chose to start fresh by grounding everything in empathy, strategy, and real data.

Starting where every good HR project starts: with the truth

Before we could introduce anything new, we needed an unfiltered view of what already existed. Too often, HR teams jump straight to solutions, but without the truth, you end up solving the wrong problem.

We began by mapping our current perks ecosystem end-to-end to better understand what we offered, who actually used it, what it cost, and how easy (or not) it was to administer. We discovered that many of our current perks were underutilized, misaligned, or simply too complicated to be worth the effort.

This data told us what was happening, but now we needed to know why. So we went straight to the source, our employees, to get their feedback and help on shaping the path forward. 

Our incredible People Ops Director at the time led a companywide perks survey asking employees what they valued, what they could live without, and what they wished we offered. We also sat down with our ERGs to better understand unique needs across identities and lived experiences, because “one-size-fits-all” never actually fits anyone.

Within weeks, we had a clearer picture of what mattered most to our employees. They wanted perks that offered flexibility, aligned with their actual lives, and were clear and accessible.

Building something better — and more human

Armed with these insights from employees, we set out to rebuild a perks program that truly worked for our people and for the business. 

Our goal was simple but ambitious: design a program that reflected our values, aligned with our newly crafted Total Rewards philosophy, supported diverse needs, and could scale alongside the company. Equally important? It had to be much easier for our Benefits Manager to administer (more on this below!).

Here’s where we landed:

• We evolved some existing perks. Our home-office stipend was revamped, we added tuition reimbursement to our learning and development stipend, and we expanded our family planning support and family concierge services. We also expanded our gender-affirming care stipend to better meet the needs of eligible employees.
• We offered some new options. We introduced a wellness/fitness stipend and a therapy stipend. One key learning was that having a standalone therapy stipend was important to our employees. Culturally, it sent a message that employees wouldn’t have to choose between using the wellness stipend for a gym membership or therapy — they could do both. Operationally, it mitigated potential barriers to access to mental health support for employees who wanted to reduce their out-of-pocket costs.
• We thought beyond the stipends. In addition to financial-based stipends, the feedback from employees elevated a need for more holistic well-being support. We introduced monthly self-care days and no-meeting Fridays as a starting point to address some of the things that were impacting employee productivity and morale.

After crunching the numbers and securing buy-in from other execs, it was time to put our new program into action. This included the critical step of solving for ease of use and administration.

Enter Compt — our secret weapon

Designing the right perks program was only half the challenge. The other half that every HR leader knows all too well is making sure the program could actually run without burning out our People team and confusing employees.

Our Benefits Manager was (and still is) an absolute rockstar: service-oriented, committed to a top-notch employee experience, and has never met a challenge she wouldn’t tackle head-on. However, she had too many manual tasks to manage. Things like verifying receipts, untangling spreadsheets, and chasing the never-ending “Where do I submit this?” questions were taking up a lot of her time. 

We needed a way to administer the perks program that was flexible, compliant, easy for employees to navigate, and met the needs of our program administrators and friends in Finance. This is where Compt was a lifesaver!

After researching a few tools, we landed on Compt because it offered exactly what we needed: an employee lifestyle benefits platform that allowed us to:

• Set up multiple stipends, each with its own amount, cadence, and eligibility criteria.
• Vastly improve the employee experience with visibility into exactly what was available to them, what they’d submitted throughout the year, and balances they should be sure to use before any cut-off dates. It also created a smooth submission process — no more hunting for forms!
• Ensure compliance and protect employee privacy, especially for sensitive categories like mental health.
• Easily track real-time utilization (with some amazing, detailed reports) so we could monitor the effectiveness of our new program on an ongoing basis.
• Provide our Finance friends visibility into utilization and spend so budgets can be monitored and updated accordingly.
• Eliminate manual approvals with automated workflows that would scale with us as the company grew.

The outcome? Employees loved the flexibility. Finance appreciated the accuracy and transparency. Our Benefits Manager loved the administrative simplicity and the tons of time she got back!

Compt helped us take a human-centered perks strategy and operationalize it in a modern, scalable, data-driven way. It was the right strategy and the right system working together.

What I learned

Rebuilding a perks program in the midst of workplace disruption confirmed for me the power of human-centered design and that companies should do their best to meet people where they are. When you strip away assumptions and actually listen, employees will tell you exactly what they need. When you pair that insight with flexible, well-designed, well-administered programs, the results are undeniable.

Companies and HR/Total Rewards leaders are navigating rising costs (e.g., healthcare and other operational costs), which means every investment has to be the right one. Perks can’t be viewed as just the “extras” off to the side that go unmanaged and unmonitored until it’s time to cut costs. They must be strategic and responsive to your unique business and employee needs in a way that strengthens trust, culture, and performance.

If you’re rethinking how to design perks that actually work for your people and your HR team, request a demo to see how Compt makes flexible, human-centered benefits easy to run.

Want more customer input? View all of Compt’s case studies.