COMP NEWS – As companies seek to cut costs in order to shore up profits, white-collar employees are now seeing their benefits slashed again after a dramatic post-COVID period of expansion.

With companies looking to cut costs in a high-inflation landscape, a bevy of employee perks that saw a rise during the hypercompetitive post-pandemic job market is on the chopping block, including tuition assistance, charitable gift matching, and even dental insurance.

Still, there’s one benefit that remains untouched—and it’s to do with keeping parents happy.

That’s the takeaway from a Glassdoor analysis of 2024 workplace trends, which reveals a shifting landscape in some of the most popular benefits of the last few years.

Take mobile-phone discounts, which were available at a majority of employers six years ago, according to Glassdoor’s analysis of employee reviews. As of 2023, those discounts have fallen off a cliff, Glassdoor reveals.

Commuter assistance, which peaked in 2020, has since fallen to its pre-pandemic level, and gym memberships, which were all the rage among tech sector employers in 2019, have fallen nearly to zero. 

One of the few areas of benefits that seems to remain untouched are parenthood benefits, such as adoption and fertility assistance

Even among the landscape of cost-cutting, though, benefits that focus on family — including adoption or fertility assistance and parental leave—have grown sharply, including since the pandemic.

“There is a trend of more family-focused benefits,” Terrazas said.

Adoption assistance went from nonexistent in 2017 to appearing in about a quarter of employer reviews this year; among financial services employers, the benefit is nearly ubiquitous, Glasdoor’s analysis shows. Fertility assistance and parental leave rose from negligible in 2017 to appearing in half of reviews in 2023 (and nearly universal among financial services and tech employers). 

There are two overlapping reasons for this, according to Glassdoor. The largest generation in the workplace—the millennials—are now in their 30s, the peak years for child raising. Their aging into parenthood coincided with the pandemic-era push to keep working parents on the job, where employers rolled out a slate of formal and informal perks to make it easier to work amid household responsibilities—from parental leave to flexible work schedules.

With a concerted push to bring workers back to the office (at least some of the time), and white-collar workers in general enjoying less cushy terms than they had in the last few years, the family-friendly trend could easily reverse, Terrazas noted. But one factor in its favor is that parental benefit policies can be surprisingly cheap for the employer, he said.

To read more about the few benefits companies aren’t slashing, click here.

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