By Ken Schachter / Newsday/TNS
LONG Island (LI) companies that employ millennials in hot fields, such as Internet design, software and digital marketing, are showering employees with Google-style perks—from manicure stations to Nerf-gun shootouts to all-expenses-paid vacations.
ArkNet Media, a Garden City company that runs a stable of web sites selling periodicals, contact lenses and event-planning services, seeks to lighten the work grind with miniature golf and video-game areas, short hours on summer Fridays and employee guitar jams. As part of their orientation, new hires are issued a Nerf gun.
“We do full-blown Nerf battles,” CEO Ryan Alovis said. “It’s organic….Someone gets shot in the back, and the next thing you know it’s a full-blown civil war.”
The concept, Alovis said, is that a happy work environment is a productive one. He does “whatever it takes for the office to be relaxed and fun,” Alovis said.
Nontraditional perks have established a beachhead in the workplace, according to a survey of about 300 New York small-business owners in August and September by Bank of America. The survey found that 17 percent of the businesses had places to “unwind” such as nap pods or game rooms; 17 percent had office happy hours; and 13 percent allowed workers to bring pets.
Moreover, the work force is changing. Millennials (ages 18 to 34, by some measures) now comprise the largest segment of the US work force, at 34 percent, surpassing Gen Xers (35 to 50) in the first quarter of 2015, and baby boomers (51 to 69) in 2014, according to Pew Research Center. On LI, the work force appears to skew slightly older with millennials ages 19-34 accounting for 31 percent of the total, according to the state Department of Labor.
The exemplar for over-the-top perks is online search giant Google and its recently formed parent company, Alphabet Inc. The 2013 Vince Vaughn film comedy The Internship—in which two older, out-of-work salesmen land on a Google campus dominated by brainy millennials—touched on the free lunches, massages, nap pods, concierge services and campus bicycles offered by the Mountain View, California, company.
But Google-style perks have also percolated to other types of businesses on LI—bedding, legal and food companies, as well.
Perks aren’t universal
NOT everyone is splurging on perks for millennials. Lauren Bigelow, chief executive of Ann Arbor, Michigan, consultancy Growth Capital Network, said that some companies simply cannot afford a full suite of perks—and some prefer a traditional approach to perks.
“We’ve got a nice pantry in the office . . . but we don’t have a Google cafeteria with a barista and yogurt bar,” she said.
When companies do offer expanded perks, their motives may not be entirely altruistic. LI hovers near full employment, a theoretical point at which the economy is operating most efficiently, and at which competition for skilled workers becomes intense. In October, LI’s unemployment rate fell to 4.1 percent, the Department of Labor reported.
Besides competing with each other for job candidates with coveted skills, local companies also contend with millennials’ attraction to nearby New York.
“We’re in competition with [Manhattan] and Brooklyn, which are both hot areas for digital marketing and are home to [local operations of] Google and Facebook,” said Ernie Canadeo, who runs EGC Group Inc., a 60-person Melville digital marketing firm, where about three-fifths of the workers are millennials. “The tendency of those companies is to offer more perks than traditional companies offer.”
In response, Canadeo provides free snacks all day, allows jeans, T-shirts and sneakers for workers who are not meeting clients and lets workers bring their pets to work.
At EGC’s 30th anniversary celebration at Huntington’s Oheka Castle in October, guests quaffed a custom-made craft beer, EGC 1985 IPA, and three veteran employees and their companions received all-expenses-paid vacations — to anywhere.
EGC also created an open workspace that would fit seamlessly in the SoHo, Dumbo or Nolita neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn. “We built out an open floor plan, high exposed ceilings and contemporary lighting,” he said. “The goal for us is to keep talented young people on Long Island,” Canadeo said.
Buncee LLC, a Calverton maker of multimedia educational tools, offers a summer beach trip on Peconic Bay, where workers splash and kayak together. Marie Arturi, Buncee’s founder, said the workday outing helps knit together her company’s workers, who operate in an intensely competitive environment.
The outing also signals appreciation for crunch times like meeting a June deadline when software developers were “literally sleeping overnight” in the office, Arturi said.
Dealertrack Technologies Inc., a maker of software for auto dealerships, also competes with firms in New York for software engineers. The company, acquired in October for $4 billion by Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises Inc., offers its roughly 500 Lake Success employees weekly chair massages, Mister Softee Ice Cream in the summer and office delivery from an online farmers marketplace.
Almost any day can provide an excuse to celebrate or give back, from Halloween to Cinco de Mayo to St. Patrick’s Day to International Dessert Day, when employee-made desserts are sold to benefit a charity for the homeless.
“It helps build culture and camaraderie at the office. It brings everybody out from their cubes,” company spokesman Michael DeMeo said.
Multitude of forms
BENEFITS can take a multitude of forms.
Uniondale law firm Rivkin Radler LLP runs a “Fabulous February” program, where events focus on team building. Two years ago, the event had an Olympics theme with ski jumping and slalom competitions (via gaming computers) and medal ceremonies. Last year, the theme was “Rivkin Radler Has Heart” and included a blood drive, a Family Feud game and a Pictionary contest.
A manicurist makes regular visits to the Hicksville headquarters of mattress retail chain Sleepy’s, which also offers a free on-site gym.
Hain Celestial Group Inc.’s headquarters in Lake Success has a historic patina as the interim headquarters of the United Nations in the 1940s as well as pingpong tables and a yoga room for the roughly 350 employees at that location.
The maker of health food, which posted fiscal 2015 net sales of $2.7 billion, employs about 30 reverse commuters from New York and offers them a shuttle bus from the Great Neck train station.
Bedding and mattress manufacturer Bedgear LLC tore down the walls inside its Farmingdale headquarters and created an open layout as an extension of its business philosophy of empowering workers to make decisions without fearing retribution for a misstep, chief executive Eugene Alletto said.
“The most important thing is to have an environment that’s engaging to people,” he said.
Alletto said that Bedgear has offered massages and manicures, but an honest culture is the touchstone in attracting millennials.
“They can smell a rat pretty quickly,” he said.
Generation gap?
MUCH of the urge to splurge on millennials is based on the belief that they are unlike the baby boomers and Gen X workers. Surveys come to mixed conclusions about whether there is a real distinction in attitudes.
Whatever the surveys say, many business insiders perceive a generation gap.
While boomers made a beeline toward “wealth and status,” said David Pennetta, who runs the Melville office of commercial real estate company Cushman & Wakefield Inc., millennials want to devote time to charities and they prefer a boss who is also a mentor.
“The millennials want to move around,” he said. “They want to talk. They like their companies to be involved in philanthropic efforts.”
And, Pennetta said, they are more likely to seek recognition of their efforts than older workers.
“They need the ‘atta boy’ thing,” he said. “The boomers keep grinding the stone till [they’re] dead.”
Some managers believe catering to younger workers can go too far.
Consulting firm CEO Bigelow said millennials should temper their expectations and sense of entitlement.
“I started being far more brusque in my hiring,” she said. She looks “for millennials who have a fire in their bellies and a passion for doing something.”
“This is work. You’re not coming to Disneyland to start your career. You’re not always going to be right, and there’s not going to be a trophy at the end of it,” she said.