Employee Housecleaning as a Startup Benefit

After reading the interview with the Evernote CEO in which he mentions housecleaning as a benefit for every one of his employees I thought to myself that we should do that as well. Done. Housecleaning, when first mentioned, elicits a more dramatic response compared to the more standard benefits. It isn’t that housecleaning is so weird that a company shouldn’t offer it as a perk, rather, it’s that it is so unusual, yet desirable, that it resonates well with people.

Here are a few reasons why we decided to offer four hours of housecleaning per month for each employee as a benefit:

• All of our employees can afford to pay for it on their own, but many do not because they think it is frivolous since they can do it themselves, but the experience of cleaning provides negative utility for most people
• We want to be the absolute best place to work
• As a company, we get economies of scale to negotiate a corporate rate that’s better than an individual rate
• Paying for the benefit for everyone, since it is a pre-tax expense, results in even more savings compared to paying employees, taxes coming out on the employer side and employee side, then an individual paying for it with after-tax money

Over time we’ll develop more experience with the housecleaning-as-perk initiative but so far so good. It’ll be interesting to see if it catches on with more startups.

What else? What are your thoughts on employee housecleaning as a startup benefit?