The power of small gestures

markets are tight, the perks tend to get better. Spotify is rolling out a new corporate-subscription package, enabling firms to offer the streaming service to their employees. If you are sufficiently high up at Goldman Sachs, you are now entitled to take as much holiday as you want (this is a nominal perk; no one who cherishes work-life balance gets to climb the ladder at Goldman in the first place). Salesforce has a ranch in California to which it can send workers for in-person get-togethers. If you work long enough for Blue Origin, you might get blasted into space. For firms that don’t own rockets or ranches, it can seem hard to compete. The good news is that small gestures of appreciation can have an outsized effect on employee satisfaction and loyalty. The bad news is that they are not meant to be scaled up.