Benefits

The subject of competitive benefits packages came up at work. As part of the survey process, some of us were given a “what if” exercise to determine how we would allocate different pools of benefit dollars to different things. The goal was to determine what employees value as important. Among the choices were:

• Medical (with $500 deductible) — $3,500/year
• Medical (with $5,000 deductible) — $1,500/year
• Dental — $600/year
• Life Insurance — $30/year for 15,000 or $75/year for 50,000 coverage
• Short-term disability — $125/year
• Long-term disability — $400/year
• Vision coverage — $75/year
• Gym membership — $800/year
• Vacation days — $400/day
• Sick days — $400/day

After three iterations of progressively diminishing benefit pools, my pattern was obvious: I most value vacation time.  As I look at my pay stub, a second curiosity reveals itself: I avoid taking time off.  As I write this, I have 24 “sick” days and almost four weeks of accrued vacation.  How the hell did that happen?

Ahem.

Back to the exercise: once a certain threshold of vacation time was available, the next most important thing to me was medical insurance.  At the bottom of my priority list was “gym membership” (for obvious reasons) and life insurance — because I can find a cheaper term life policy.

All of the other participants valued medical insurance first.  Note that I wasn’t advocating doing without medical insurance, but given its cost, I felt that I would benefit more from another 8 1/2 days of vacation time off instead.  What was most puzzling was how much people valued “sick days.”  These are like vacation days, except they are lost if untaken.  Am I missing something? Take the vacation day instead.

A similar, interesting discussion appeared on Salon de Geeks (read-only, unfortunately) considering whether, given a chance between more income and time off, why many of us would take the money.

Kiri: [I]t isn’t the case that I hate my job, not by a long shot. It’s just that I’m seeing value in a lot of other things, which my job precludes due to how much time it (normally) consumes.

I, too, generally enjoy what I do.  Really, truly – just please make El Jefe go back to the Moronosphere.  Like Kiri, I also have outside interests that I would enjoy devoting more time to.  (And when I say “outside interests,” I’m taking about something on the scale of getting another degree or going on extended travel or learning to play a musical instrument for real.)