Why ball pools and treehouses won’t make up for crappy company culture

You might think that clean-shirted clients are impressed by your unusual office paraphernalia, but there’s only so many times you can make them climb up a rickety ladder to enter your office treehouse elevated 15 feet off the floor before they sit there, with their necks craned like Gandalf in Frodo’s house, and start to wish you’d grow up.

Although it’s great to see businesses embrace more modern and flexible ways of working, too much creativity and money is being poured into silly gimmicks when it could be used to make lasting and sustainable changes that can completely overhaul company culture and result in actual improvements to employee health, happiness and wellbeing. You may be glad to hear that these changes can boost productivity and increase staff retention too.

If you take twenty minutes to search some of the world’s most notoriously trendy companies on Glassdoor, you’ll see plenty of negative reviews that suggest many of these companies are using pinball machines and mini bars as a veil to hide the negative aspects of working there.

Movie nights and free popcorn might sound great to a budding intern with little to no work experience, but what they often don’t realise is that they’ll still be stuck in the office at 10pm.

Gym membership will be free, an alarm will be raised when complimentary breakfast butties are delivered each morning and Fanta will emerge from the kitchen tap in an attempt to distract workers from the fact they’re being poorly paid.

The workplace will be transformed into Alphabet Zoo but as soon as a worker asks for a pay rise, they’ll be painted as ungrateful and entitled.

So what can employers do to make real, meaningful change to their company culture? Here are just a few ideas:

Flexibility

Give employees the freedom to choose what time they start and finish work each day. When you let your team have autonomy over their working hours, amazing things happen. Your staff will be able to avoid stressful rush hour commutes, improve their work/life balance, and work during the hours they’re most productive.

As long as the job gets done and clients are happy, the hours your team work shouldn’t really be your concern.

Competitive salaries

It doesn’t matter how frequently you use the company credit card to buy your team after-work drinks, if they’re struggling to pay the bills, they’re unlikely to stick around for long.

Although employee wellbeing is more important than ever, competitive salaries are far more effective than gimmicks and forced fun.

Trust

Trust is just as valuable in a business environment as it is in a romantic relationship. You shouldn’t have to monitor your employees’ every move in order to know they’re doing their best work. If you don’t have faith in your team, you’ve either the hired the wrong people or you need to address your own trust issues.

Worried that your most valued members of staff will go for a job interview and pretend it’s a flexi-time lie-in? Make them so happy that their absence isn’t a threat to you.

You should be so confident in your company’s culture that you know your staff aren’t going anywhere.

Jenni Hill, content executive, Run2