Poolside Benefits is an non-traditional employee benefits concept we started piloting as an add to our job marketplace to make service jobs more sustainable for workers.
We discovered while building Poolside that 42% of turnover in restaurants is due to everyday life emergencies that prevent workers from showing up to work. Poolside Benefits reimagined what benefits could be so that employers could offer their teams the safety net of traditional benefits but designed for today's emergencies, not tomorrow's.
- pilot user
-pilot user
-pilot user
-pilot user
After months of building Poolside, we discovered the deeper barriers for why workers didn’t show up or stay in a job. They were often personal emergencies that talent couldn’t cover financially—like a car breaking down or needing a last-minute babysitter.
These daily emergencies would often cost talent more to get to work than to stay home and quit.
So we asked, what if benefits were instead designed to cover today's emergencies instead of tomorrow's? And what if benefits could also help restaurants safe money while increasing retention?
Most restaurants can't afford to give their teams benefits and if they can, 63% of workers opt-out of employer based health insurance because they can't afford it either. So we set out to redesign benefits for the needs of hourly workers.
-Roti, Chicago
-Wrigleyville Rooftops, Chicago
We co-designed a suite of benefits with over 100 hourly workers to cover the most common everyday emergencies that lead to absenteeism and turnover.
With Poolside Benefits, employers could select a monthly allowance for every employee, setting a baseline amount for everyone with the ability to add additional allocations to reward tenure or performance.
Poolside Benefits gave talent radical ownership over their coverage. Every month, talent got to choose how to spend their monthly allocation across a number of benefits.
For as little as $25 per team member, Poolside Benefits gave employers a powerful benefits program that they could afford, one that 88% of talent said improved their job satisfaction.
Poolside Benefits was a concept that came out of seeing a pressing need from our hourly workers on the Poolside platform and after hundreds of conversations with talent and restaurant managers.
I co-designed the user experience and pilot with my co-founder Rachel and helped us secure additional funding from our investors for us to pursue the concept.
I supported the development of Poolside Benefits through: user research, product marketing and sales, experience design, fundraising, and business model design.
When you're ready to code, do it internally. Avoid outsourcing. Startups need to be learning organizations and part of what you need to learn is how to build and rebuild and iterate quickly. This is a core capability to your business.
Sometimes you're just too early to market. Poolside benefits faced an uphill battle against the industry's long-standing tradition of not giving and not expecting on the job benefits. If we had survived the pandemic this would have been a lifeline for service and hourly workers.
Building two products at the same time should be avoided at all costs. If you can, it's best to get one product for one customer working and profitable before you consider product expansion.
Make your original user insight into your north star. This will tie you less to a specific solution and help you focus on solving your customer challenge instead.
Build first with lightweight approaches like no-code or manual services before coding. Start scrappy and validate the business, product, and experience before you invest in writing a line of code.
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