There are workplace perks that arrive with a budget, a vendor and a launch email. Then there are the ones employees remember long after the announcement has disappeared from their inbox. A manager who says, “Go home, we will deal with this tomorrow.” The freedom to attend to something urgent without explaining every personal detail. Being trusted to manage one’s time without having to demonstrate constant availability.
These gestures rarely feature in a benefits brochure. Some are so ordinary that employees might reasonably wonder why they should be considered perks at all. Yet in workplaces where every absence needs justification and every hour must be accounted for, even a little discretion can feel unusually generous.
Three HR leaders reflect on the everyday freedoms that make work easier to manage, often without requiring organisations to spend much at all.
When understanding becomes a managerial skill
Deepika Pillai, VP HR, TELUS Digital
Deepika Pillai’s answer to the question of a low-cost workplace perk is not a policy or programme. It is a manager who understands that employees are managing more than their jobs.
In India, that understanding has particular significance. Employees may be balancing responsibilities towards children, parents, spouses and in-laws, sometimes simultaneously.
Pillai’s argument is not that managers should lower expectations or excuse poor performance. It is that they should recognise when someone needs room to manage personal responsibilities without turning every such situation into a request for special treatment.
Sometimes that means allowing an employee to leave on time because travelling late may be unsafe. At other times, it means accommodating a personal commitment without demanding an elaborate explanation. Neither requires an exceptional act of generosity. What changes is the assumption underlying the interaction. The employee is no longer required to prove that a personal need is sufficiently important to deserve consideration.
Pillai also sees a longer-term return on such understanding. Drawing on her experience at TELUS Digital, she observes that managers who extend flexibility often build teams more willing to reciprocate when work demands additional effort. Trust, in that sense, can become self-reinforcing. Employees who feel their circumstances are respected have fewer reasons to regard every organisational request as an imposition.
The difficulty, of course, is that this depends heavily on the manager. Two employees working under the same company policy can have very different experiences depending on whether their managers regard flexibility as a normal part of managing people or a favour to be granted reluctantly.
The freedom to deal with real life
Milmil Das, CHRO, Jakson Green
Milmil Das approaches the same question from the perspective of how flexibility operates in practice. A policy may promise accommodation, but its value depends on whether employees can actually use it without navigating unnecessary approvals or feeling that they have inconvenienced the organisation.
At Jakson Green, employees can choose when to begin their workday within a defined window, complete their required hours and leave accordingly. Managers have discretion to respond when someone needs to attend to a family emergency or health-related situation. Employees who work unusual hours or weekends can take compensatory time off. These arrangements recognise a fairly obvious reality: personal responsibilities do not always organise themselves around office schedules.
What matters is the degree of control employees have over their time. A flexible starting window may seem like a modest adjustment, but it can make a considerable difference to someone managing a school drop-off, a long commute or responsibilities at home. Similarly, compensatory time off becomes meaningful when employees can actually take it, rather than merely accumulate an entitlement that workload prevents them from using.
Das also points to a quarterly practice in which Jakson Green opens its workplace to employees’ families. Children and spouses get an opportunity to see where their family member spends a substantial part of the day. Unlike scheduling flexibility, such an initiative requires some organisation and resources. Its value lies in acknowledging that an employee’s working life has consequences for people who are not on the payroll.
The common thread is recognition of circumstances beyond the job description. For Das, flexibility works best when it is part of ordinary managerial judgement rather than an exception employees must repeatedly negotiate.
Give people back their time
Varadarajan Raja, former CHRO, Vistara
Varadarajan Raja takes the question in a slightly different direction. Instead of asking what organisations can give employees, he asks what they could stop demanding from them unnecessarily.
Consider the working day. A calendar filled with meetings leaves little time for the work those meetings are supposedly meant to advance. Employees may be expected to attend discussions where their presence adds little, respond to messages late at night or remain visibly available long after their responsibilities for the day have been completed. None of these expectations necessarily appears in a formal policy, yet together they can determine how exhausting a workplace feels.
Raja’s suggestions are practical. Protect periods without meetings so people can concentrate. Allow employees to decline meetings where their participation is unnecessary. Ensure compensatory time off is genuinely available when people work beyond normal hours. Most importantly, managers should demonstrate through their own behaviour that leaving on time is acceptable, rather than praising work-life balance while quietly rewarding those who remain online longest.
The benefit of such changes is easy to underestimate because they do not arrive as something new. An unnecessary meeting that never happens produces no announcement. A message that waits until morning attracts no attention. Yet both return something employees often struggle to protect: time over which they have some control.
There is also a question of trust beneath these practices. An organisation that measures commitment through constant availability may find it difficult to give employees genuine autonomy, however generous its formal benefits. Raja’s argument suggests that improving employee experience can sometimes begin by examining the demands organisations have gradually come to regard as normal.
The value of being trusted
The practices described by these three leaders are not identical. Some involve managerial discretion, others require formal arrangements, and a few need modest organisational investment. What connects them is the willingness to recognise that employees have responsibilities, constraints and priorities that do not disappear when the working day begins.
A manager who allows somebody to leave on time without embarrassment, a flexible schedule that accommodates family responsibilities or a meeting that is cancelled because nobody really needs it may appear insignificant in isolation. Their cumulative effect is more substantial. They shape how much control people feel they have over their working lives and how much trust they believe the organisation places in them.
The most revealing aspect of these so-called perks is that many should not have to be perks at all. Being able to attend to a personal emergency, disconnect after work or manage one’s responsibilities without constant scrutiny ought to be ordinary features of a reasonable workplace. Their continued appeal says something about how unevenly those expectations are met.
Organisations can spend considerable sums making work more attractive. Sometimes they might achieve just as much by examining why employees need permission for things that should never have been difficult in the first place.
What is the low-cost workplace practice that has made the biggest difference to you? Share it in the comments.