The Best Workplaces Benefits Playbook

Great Place To Work, with SG Fleet as sponsor, brought together Anna Konishi (Cisco), Steven Elvin (Flight Centre) and Michelle Loader (Future Leadership) to talk about how Australia’s best workplaces are designing employee benefits that connect to culture and, where possible, to business results.

What “benefits” even means anymore

The panel spent the opening stretch pulling apart a term that’s grown far broader than its legal definition. The ATO’s version is narrow and tax-driven: a non-cash benefit provided by an employer to an employee. What the panellists described inside their own organisations was much wider, stretching from financial mentoring and travel discounts through to leadership development and coaching. Steven’s approach at Flight Centre has been to stop drawing hard lines between “perks,” “programs” and “initiatives” and just call all of it benefits, testing each one against the company’s ten core philosophies to decide whether it belongs.

From supporting the job to supporting the career

Michelle’s central point was a shift in what benefits are there to do. They used to sit alongside the work itself, health insurance, discounts, extra leave. Increasingly, they’re expected to support the shape of someone’s whole career: capability building, mentoring, coaching, access to development. Steven’s 25 years at Flight Centre came up more than once as the kind of long tenure that’s now the exception rather than the rule, and part of why organisations are rethinking what keeps people around.

Letting people choose their own mix

One idea recurred across the conversation: “stackable” benefits, where instead of one fixed package for everyone, staff choose across tiered categories, closer to a personal allowance than a standard list. Michelle described this as an emerging response to just how differently people value the same benefit depending on their life stage and circumstances.

What it looks like in practice

Flight Centre’s internal benefit ecosystem gave the clearest concrete picture. Their “WISERs” business units, Healthwise, Travelwise, Moneywise and Worldwise, cover on-site gyms and massage therapists, free money mentoring, an internal home loan brokerage team, discounted travel, and a “giving bank” that lets staff donate up to 20 days of personal leave to a colleague in crisis. Cisco’s approach leans more preventive: volunteer leave, a full company shutdown day every quarter, a growing focus on preventive health, and a new concierge service to help staff navigate family and pet care admin.

Spending more doesn’t guarantee a better score

Flight Centre increased benefits spend by roughly 15% one year and its engagement score dropped. The following year, rolling benefits that already worked in Australia out into other regions, rather than simply spending more, lifted the score back up. It was a useful reminder from Steven that fit matters more than budget size.

Knowing when to cut something

Steven’s rule of thumb for sunsetting a benefit is usage, not assumption: if something’s built for thousands of staff and only a fraction use it, that’s the signal. Both Steven and Michelle stressed replacing rather than simply removing, and going directly to staff for input rather than guessing from the top down. Michelle’s example was a 200-person organisation that asked staff to rank its 20 existing benefits and vote on one new addition.

Making the case to a CFO

Michelle’s advice for pitching benefits spend: lead with the trade-off. The opening line a CFO usually wants to hear is “here’s what I’m going to stop, so I can start this,” rather than a straight ask for more budget.