CINCINNATI — As businesses do their best to lure employees back to work, one locally headquartered company is helping pioneer a new frontier of work-life balance.
“You have employers that are taking the carrot approach or the stick approach,” said Janet Harrah, professor at the NKU Haile College of Business.
Along with teaching the business leaders of tomorrow, Harrah also consults for several companies in the Tri-State. She said many of them are trying to entice, rather than enforce, coming back to the office.
“Sometimes what people think they might want is not something they’ll actually use,” Harrah said.
One in-house program for Fifth Third employees has a 99.8% approval rating, a concierge service run by Cincinnati-based Best Upon Request.
When employees go to the second floor of their building on Fountain Square, Katie is usually one of the first faces they see in the morning and one of the last before they go home.
“Aside from health care benefits, it’s probably the best I’ve ever experienced in my working career,” Fifth Third Chief Marketing Officer Melissa Stevens said.
Katie is one of three concierges every employee has access to. They run all types of errands, from picking up groceries to dropping off packages.
‘We save about a little over an hour for every service we perform,” Best Upon Request CEO Bill Mills said. “If you use a concierge service two or three times a week, you could save half a day.”
Fifth Third hired this concierge service before the start of the pandemic, and they helped pioneer a branch of it, the maternity concierge. It’s the brainchild of women who have the tough choice of choosing children or career.
A recent State of Motherhood report from Motherly shows the number of stay-at-home moms nearly doubled from 2022 to 2023.
The maternity concierge is available as soon as employees find out they're pregnant and can use it until the child turns one. An asset many working moms take full advantage of.
“She said sometimes I get stuck at work late and when I do I call the concierge and the concierge takes my child’s dinner to my home to my husband,” Mills said.
Harrah said perks like these are pivotal to not only bringing employees back but keeping them around.
“It’s a challenging environment for the employers and the employees right now,” Harrah said. “Employees, they’ve worked at home and they saved a lot of money. They have no commuting costs, no parking costs, they reduced their childcare costs.
“In the interim, we’ve had 3 and a half years of very high inflation and wages of not kept up,” she said. “So now the employers are saying we want you to come back, so take on all those costs again, but we’re not going to raise your rates. Well, that doesn’t really work.”
During the pandemic when many of us worked from home, families also got back a lot more time, even while they were on the clock. And who knows? It might come to your office.
“The number of people I have introduced to Best Upon Request so they can talk about getting a business relationship is well over double digits,” said Stevens.
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