Warby Parker CPO shares her advice for benefits pros

To cut or not to cut benefits?

That is the question plaguing many total rewards professionals as rising costs put pressure on them to rethink their benefit plans.

And sometimes, the answer is to cut benefits. Chelsea Kaden, chief people officer at eyeglass retailer Warby Parker, shared her experience answering this question during a recent HR Brew event.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is your benefit and culture strategy?

We have about over 4,000 employees, 350 stores…We have our corporate team. We have a customer experience team. We have employees in two optical labs, and then we have all of these stores, and…we offer the same benefits to everyone. So, if you are a manager in the New York City office, you have access to the same benefits as a full-time supervisor in a store.

We spend a lot of time cultivating engagement and belonging in our workspaces, so that looks different in our corporate offices, whether we host an event, or an offsite, or a book club, or a run club, and then we give budget to our stores to make sure that they have access to do things as groups within their stores…that is a real differentiator for us.

We also have a great culture, and feeling like you belong and are part of the community is really important to our team members who come to work for Warby. And, so, we don’t have to put something in front of them and say, “It’s great to work here, and, look, you have access to these 10 things,” and maybe distracting from this thing over here.

You’ve been at the company for eight years. How was the transition from offering benefits as a startup to now?

When I got to Warby, we still felt like a startup. We had 300 corporate employees. We still have 300 corporate employees, so that part of our business hasn’t necessarily grown, and we did things like give the same things to everyone without necessarily thinking about how that might not scale in the stores.

We had a flexible time-off policy that was a real startup trend…and it ended up just being very complicated to administer, and if you’re a store leader, it’s confusing and ambiguous…so, we moved every salary team member to an accrual policy, partially to get people just to take their time off, and it be clear this is how much time you have…But, that’s a change that we made that was the right thing for the whole company.

What is your advice for other benefits pros who have to scale back their offerings?

We 100% have had to take things away over the years…When I got to Warby, we had this wellness benefit where you could basically expense your gym membership, and it was available to everyone in the field and in the stores, and it actually wasn’t utilized that much, like maybe 40% utilization.

We got to this place about a year later where we had to manage costs…We ended up cutting it, and I still hear about it. It was pretty noisy because people were just like you took something away from me…I don’t have the perfect solution besides how you communicate it is really important…Not hiding it, and really being transparent around it has created trust between us and our employees.