Despite having a turnover rate far below the average, even for this industry, it’s a LUXURY to suddenly find yourself in the office one day along with the Project Managers and some of the company’s founders, thinking of ways to retain our company’s talent, so that the teams could be more involved and so that everybody could know just how much they’re valued.

In multinational companies, or when you are backed up by large investors, it’s a whole lot easier. However, in start up companies, with their usual uncertainties, it’s important to be creative to compensate for the lack of resources, so we did some sort of Brainstorming involving some team members. It didn’t take long to come up with ideas and suggestions.

We already had one thing out of the way. Well, until then, we enjoyed carrying out many sports and leisure activities inside and outside of working hours: 12 free hours annually for flexible days, free English classes, one hour of flexibility to start the work day, intensive summer schedule, a distribution policy providing biannual benefits for all employees… Our idea was to improve.

It didn’t take long to get the approval from the co-founders. We only included realistic ideas so that there could be a sense of negotiation and they could reject some and … that’s it! Almost 100% of the ideas were approved!

From that point on, not too long after, and in addition to the benefits we already had, we adopted some new ones:

· Friendly card: A personalized card with special discounts in different establishments.

· Receive a personalized gift for celebrating the anniversary of the the day we started working at From the Bench.

· Baby Voucher to celebrate the birth of the new From the Bench babies.

· Celebration of charity days.

· Flexible schedule to better accommodate family life and enjoy our free time. This allows us, for example, to leave work at 4:30 p.m. because we want to spend the evening on the beach, and the next day, go to work at 9:30 a.m. so have enough time to drop the kids off at daycare.

· After four years of working for the company, we can enjoy one additional day off to celebrate our birthday.

The inquietude to improve everything related to the management of those in From the Bench makes it a LUXURY to be a part of this project as an HR Manager, because I’m sure that soon we will be proposing one additional step:

Continue improving to be THE BEST PLACE TO WORK.