Does Your Company Offer ‘Life Support?’

Kristen Graham Brown, owner of branding agency Hoot Design Company, spoke about this amazing employee program at Changemakers  — an event I co-hosted with Kanika Chadda Gupta and Sarah Benken Foushee earlier this year in NYC.

Life support is a reimbursement program for anything that allows employees to buy back their time — things like house cleaning and meal prep. Could you imagine if every company offered this?

When I asked Kristen what her inspiration was to launch this program, she said:

“Since time is our only nonrenewable resource, it seemed like this is one of the most powerful things we could offer so that our employees could be happier, healthier, and sane. Also, I’ve always been interested in being on the front end of workplace benefits and progression, and this occurred to me as an interesting way to stay "progressive" while also creating a unique benefit. I have many employees who can make more money elsewhere, so I try to create an environment and an ecosystem of benefits that counterbalances that fact.”

A little bit more about the program: full-time employees get $250/month in reimbursement, and part-time employees get $150/month. Kristen started offering this program to the leadership team around three years ago and is rolling it out to the whole team in 2024.

I have to ask: Does your company offer a program that allows employees to buy back their time? I’m officially obsessed with this idea.

If you try any of these strategies in your next negotiation, please reach out to tell me how it went! Good luck! Stay connected! For career insights, book recommendations and a roundup of interesting stuff that's on my radar, sign up for my monthly newsletter.