A “benefit” is something that a company gives its employees other than money. Different companies offer different types of benefits, and these should be considered a part of your overall compensation.
At LACRM, we try to strike a balance between offering competitive benefits while still giving you control over how your money is spent. For example, we don't offer benefits like free gym memberships because we'd rather add that extra money to your pay check and let you decide how to spend it, but we do invest in the types of benefits that you can't easily buy for yourself.
Here's a list of the various benefits we offer:
We offer a 401(k) plan through Vanguard. Employees become eligible 6-months after their full-time start date. If you don't know what a 401(k) is, it’s basically just a bank account to help you save for retirement. You tell us how much money you want to contribute from each paycheck, and we put it into the account for you. By doing it this way rather than using a normal personal bank account, you can avoid paying a significant amount of taxes.
As an extra benefit, the company contributes additional money to your 401(k). This is similar to a "match" which is when the company matches the amount of money you put in personally up to a certain amount, except that we don't think a match is fair to people who can't afford to put in their own money. So in our case, we'll put an extra 3% of your salary (on top of your normal salary, this money isn't coming out of your pay check) towards your 401(k) regardless of how much you contribute.
More details are available here. Robert will reach out when you become eligible, and you can feel free to ask him if you have questions about the plan before then. If you find the theory and/or practice behind saving for retirement confusing or intimidating, your colleagues can likely offer direction (though not professional financial advice, of course).
Less Annoying CRM offers a group health insurance plan through United Healthcare. The base plan is a “silver” plan. The company pays for 50% of the base plan, and employees who choose to participate pay the other 50%. Employees can add dependents and/or upgrade to more expensive plans (we also offer gold and platinum options), but they must pay 100% of the additional amount.
Our health insurance plan is only available to full-time non-temporary workers (i.e. interns aren’t eligible). If you would like to participate in the plan, you should be able to opt in via Gusto (our payroll software). Talk to Robert if you have any questions.
Because it’s very easy for employees to pay for their own dental and vision expenses (or buy insurance if they want) we believe this should be something employees choose for themselves. However, as a convenience to employees, and to add a small bit of tax savings, we do have dental and vision plans that you can opt into via Gusto (just like you do with health insurance).
You’ll be responsible for paying 100% of the cost for these plans, so you should consider whether or not this is actually cheaper than paying your dental and vision expenses yourself.
We want to give everyone at LACRM as much freedom as possible, and that includes being able to work remotely. At the same time, our culture is primarily based on in-person interactions, so we need to be sure that everyone gets some face-time each week.
To balance these two priorities, we set Wednesday and Thursday as the two required in-office days each week. Everyone is expected to come to the office those two days. The remaining three days (Monday, Tuesday, and Friday) are up you. You can come in to the office if you want, or work remotely if you want.
Additionally, you may take up to eight “flex” remote days per year. These are days that would normally be in-person, but where you decide to work remotely. We also allow remote work anytime there is severe weather, or if you are sick (but not sick enough that you want to take a sick day) and might be contagious.
See Office policies for specific instructions on how to work remotely.