95% Team Participation: How Fictiv Transformed Employee Benefits

Meet: Melissa Salcius

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Fictiv is a technology and manufacturing company with over 100 employees. The name ‘Fictiv’ reflects their mission to overcome obstacles in hardware innovation. Often called ‘The AWS of manufacturing’, Fictiv delivers precision parts on-demand through its digital platform and global partner network. In the past 7 years, Fictiv has produced over 16 million parts, helping businesses bring new products to market faster.

Melissa Salcius, Director of People Operations at Fictiv, faced the challenge of updating the company’s benefits program when COVID-19 shifted its workforce to remote work. The existing benefits, which included in-office meals, a continuous learning stipend, and standard insurance offerings, became outdated and inadequate for a distributed team, leaving Melissa to find a solution that would effectively support and engage employees in a new work environment.

Challenge: maintaining high employee participation for a remote team

The shift to remote work had created a whole new set of challenges for their employees, from managing their workspaces to balancing personal and professional life. Melissa knew she needed to find a way to support her team in this new reality because virtually overnight, Fictiv joined thousands of companies throughout the nation and globally to transition its workforce to remote work. 

Sure, some things could adapt to remote work but lots of it didn’t make sense anymore, and overall it didn’t address employees’ current work-life needs. The pressure was on to create a benefits package that would not only keep employees happy but also help them thrive in a remote work environment. This meant finding a way to build an employee benefits program that was exciting, relevant, and able to be tailored to fit each Fictors’ (what they call their employees) needs today and into the future.

What next: exploring solutions

“Our goal was to offer attractive perks that supported each of our employees’ needs, regardless of whether they’re in office, remote, or what region they’re in,” says Melissa. To achieve this, she had to figure out how to replace office perks like free lunches with something equally valuable for a remote team. She also wanted to support professional growth, cover increased home office expenses, and foster a strong team culture even when everyone was apart.

Solution: the breakthrough

Fictiv found the answer in Compt. This platform allowed them to create a flexible perks program tailored to each employee’s needs. Instead of traditional perks, Fictiv offered stipends for things like cell phones, internet, and professional development. Employees could use these funds to support their unique work-life balance and personal goals.

With Compt, Fictiv simplified its HR processes while giving employees more control over their benefits. And as a bonus, they also enjoyed guaranteed tax compliance.  

Fictiv’s perk stipend program with Compt includes:

• Cell Phone Stipend 
• Internet Stipend
• Virtual Work Stipend
• Continuous Learning Stipend
• Team Building Events Stipend

These stipends cover 13 different categories of employee spending, which have all become important to employee well-being and satisfaction in this new era of work. Here are 5 of those categories in order of highest spending among Fictiv’s employees: 

• Cell Phone 
• Food
• Professional Development
• Health & Wellness
• Internet

Results: impact in action

Compt has been instrumental for us to be able to increase employee satisfaction and utilization rates far higher than we could have ever achieved with our old perks approach.

Melissa Salcius. Director of People Operations at Fictiv

Choosing Compt to transform its perks program turned out to be a great decision, and the real proof is in their increased employee satisfaction and participation.

Even during the pandemic, Fictiv transformed its workplace into one where employees were eager to log on each day. By focusing on employee well-being and providing personalized perks, Fictiv showed a strong commitment to its team, and the results have been exceptional.

Almost all employees used the new benefits. A fantastic 95% of the team took advantage of the program.

Employees learned more. We saw a big jump in how often people used their learning stipends, from 17% to a great 89%.

The right benefits for everyone. A huge 81.5% of employees used the benefits they wanted.