I’m not going to lie, I have a great deal of respect for the ingenuity and passion of Elon Musk, and I have wanted a Tesla for quite some time.
The problem is they cost a bit more than my budget can handle for the moment, so I will continue to dream of owning one in the future.
It’s times like these when I wish I worked for a company like CoStar. In a recent announcement, CoStar made the bold move to incentivize employees currently working from home to make the trek back to the office.
CoStar is offering high-value prizes to those who come back
CoStar is a company of approximately 4,000 American employees that understands the importance of in-person collaboration and engagement.
The return to work push started with making the Covid-19 vaccine available to all company employees. However, even with the vaccine, employees have been reluctant to come back to the office.
And who can blame them? There’s something to be said for working in your pajamas and drinking coffee in the comfort of your own home. To entice employees to come back to the office environment, CEO Andrew Florance decided to give away several high-dollar and hard to resist prizes.
Not every employee will be a winner, but those who win the drawings are likely to be very happy campers. The incentives include a Model S Tesla, $10,000 in cash, and an all-expenses-paid trip to Barbados.
And those are just the highlights. Many other smaller items will be given away, such as gift cards to popular stores.
Florence told the Wall Street Journal, “Yes, this is a lot of money, but in the context of a multibillion-dollar company with thousands of staff and hundreds of offices, it’s a drop in the bucket. So you can have some fun, you can incentivize people to do the right thing” – namely, return to the office.
Employees assigned to one of the fifty U.S. offices are eligible to enter the drawing as long as they are willing to come back to the office on a full-time basis.
The giveaway was rolled out in April in conjunction with the vaccine program. CoStar decided on the incentives after employees voiced their concern about returning to work – even after receiving the vaccine.
The program is luring back employees at record rates
The lure of the high dollar prizes has been effective, with around 30 percent of CoStar employees choosing to return to the office. That’s a considerable increase from the 4 percent who made the commute before the giveaway was implemented.
Florence understands the return to normalcy is not going to be an overnight process. He stated, “We are going to do interesting and creative things until the workplace is settled down and until we’ve adjusted to our new reality, and I think that will be months and months and months.”
CoStar’s incentives program is one of the most ambitious in the country, but other companies are starting to follow suit. Many other companies have started offering other incentives like free lunch, childcare stipends, bonuses, and more extracurricular activities to keep employees engaged.
While many companies are doing everything they can to lure employees back to the office, some, like Microsoft, have seen the value of offering hybrid work models. Covid-19 has forced change upon the workforce, and Microsoft is trying to capitalize on providing convenient options for employees to complete their best work.
What the future holds for the workplace
As the percentage of vaccinated Americans increases, it will be interesting to see how companies entice their employees back to the office and which ones embrace the work-from-home lifestyle.
Until then, I guess I’ll have to keep saving up to buy my own Tesla.