2020 will forever go down as the year that changed almost everything.
As a company supporting the events industry, we saw first-hand how the pandemic forced marketers and other event creators to adapt and get creative.
As an employer, we’ve seen how the pandemic has changed the way we work. We’ve seen how it has intensified the way we care for our families — and ourselves. We’ve seen how the fight for equal rights has encouraged diverse groups of people to come together and support each other through the toughest of times. And we’ve learned that it’s okay to not be okay all the time.
It’s years like 2020 that bring up truly important questions, like What does all of this mean for our employees and how will it influence the future of work?
At Splash, we like to be real, so there’s no sugarcoating it: 2020 was hard. Like many other companies, we had to make difficult decisions, pivot quickly, and challenge our old beliefs. It was through those experiences that we learned three things: We needed to be more intentional about our decisions, we can’t take our culture for granted, and it’s more important than ever that we help our employees take care of themselves.
So in that spirit, we reevaluated our benefits to make sure we continue adapting as a company and giving our employees the support they need to always bring their best selves to work.
When we talk about the future of work, our minds often go straight to one of the biggest topics today: living and working from anywhere.
This has proven challenging for many organizations. Those with employees who once worked in a major metropolitan area, and are now living and working in smaller towns, are trying to identify how or if they adjust their approach to compensation. Do they still use localized compensation data, even if it means a pay decrease? And the opposite question applies for the reverse.
At Splash, we will no longer use compensation data localized to an individual employee’s home location. Instead, we are level-setting every single role in the United States to the North East (New York City) compensation band. This will support pay equity, retain our high-performing team members, cast a wider recruiting net, and build our workforce diversity.
Meanwhile, we continue to embrace remote working across all of our departments. We encourage them to live where they thrive, even if that’s not in the same location as one of our offices.
With everything that happened in 2020, it’s no surprise that the topic of mental health came to the forefront. Families, friends, and colleagues finally started openly talking about it and breaking the stigma that has surrounded it for so long.
To support the mental health toll that 2020 took, we started offering our employees two Mental Escape (ME) Days per month throughout the summer. These were two full days where employees could unplug completely from work — no Slack, no email, no texts, and no calls.
Because we’ve put such a priority on mental health (and because ME Days helped our employees recharge and bring their best selves back to work), we made them a permanent wellness benefit at Splash. Now, all employees can take two ME Days per month — indefinitely. And this is, of course, in addition to our unlimited PTO policy, which includes vacation, sick, volunteer time off, and a handful of other reasons why one might take time off.
To recognize, honor, and support our employees and community — both persons of color and their allies — Splash now acknowledges June 19 (or Juneteenth) as an official holiday. Starting in 2020, and every year after, Splash will close business globally on this date.
We’ve also begun offering several diversity and inclusion resources throughout the year to support our employees’ desire to be and do better. Among these resources include:
- Ally skills workshops, where we bring in experts to help us understand how to be the best allies we can be for marginalized communities
- Leading with empathy workshops, where we discuss ways to be more inclusive and compassionate in our personal and professional lives
- Together, Apart series, a monthly internal session where we focus on a specific topic and discuss how we can become better friends, family members, and colleagues while working virtually
- Partnership with Collective DEI, a consulting company for companies looking to make diversity and inclusion an integral part of their culture, through which we’ve developed internal surveys and action items to improve DEI at Splash
We’ve always been supportive of new families, giving 12 weeks of maternity leave for new mothers at 100% pay. But now, we’re turning this maternity leave into parental leave.
All Splash employees who have new additions to their families can now take 12 weeks of parental leave at 100% pay (compared to the standard six weeks, which is what we offered before 2021). This applies to everyone, no matter their gender or whether they identify as a primary or secondary caregiver.
Offering a sabbatical at Splash is not a new benefit — but it’s rare to find this kind of benefit these days. We believe that a sabbatical is just one more way to reward employees who have helped Splash get to where it is.
Employees who have worked at Splash for four consecutive years are eligible for a four-week paid sabbatical, no matter their level at the company, as long as they are in good standing and hitting their performance goals.
Liz Hall is the Chief People Officer at Splash, leading the business’s recruiting, L&D, employee engagement, total rewards, DEI, performance management, culture, and HR functions with the core value that employee experience is everything. She believes success comes from leading with empathy, acting intentionally, and being equitable and inclusive.
