All of automaker Telsa’s cars run 100% gas-free, and all of its employees get health care, life insurance and other benefits 100% cost-free.
“Are there benefits managers, directors, HR people here?” Tesla benefits manager Nate Randall asked a roomful of exactly those groups at this month’s Benefits Forum & Expo. A plethora of hands went up. “So, you’re going to be incredibly envious of the opportunity I have.”
Founded in 2003 and based in Silicon Valley, where most innovation goes digital, or at least rather small, the company’s product line is a little different.
“Tesla makes kick-ass, sexy electric cars – that’s what we do,” Randall said. “Our company vision basically is to change the world.”
That ambition is perhaps most evident in the firm’s workforce, which practically doubles every year. Currently the 2,500-plus workers are 95% U.S.-based and 85% male with an average age of 36 – very much, as Randall pointed out, like him.
“It’s a unique opportunity because we’re turning over our company, we’re creating who we are, and we get to touch every single person on day one and teach them what benefits are and what they can be,” Randall said.
“What I was given was a clean slate. They said, ‘Create the benefits of the future, create it for our company, make it unique, make it awesome and go ahead.’”
Very few benefits professionals have ever been ordered to “make it awesome,” but many have been told to watch costs – a fact Randall acknowledged.
“We’re not Google,” he said. “I can’t just throw everything at employees … it’s not like I have a whole ton of money.” Still, what Randall and Tesla do offer speaks for itself in a lot of ways.
“Every single employee who starts at Tesla gets health care and a full suite of benefits for no cost,” Randall said. “They get dental plan, vision plan, life insurance, all that stuff.” He mentioned small benefits, like bereavement concierge services, that go a long way with employees for their price.
“In the grand scheme of things, [health care] doesn’t cost us very much money. We’re self-insured, so most of these people are not using the care anyway,” Randall says. He lamented that the numbers seem to indicate “our employees are too damn busy to go to the doctor.”
Indeed, a huge time commitment is clearly part of the intangibles of the Tesla trade. “Work-life balance,” Randall claimed, is dead, explaining, “for my generation, I’d say work-life integration is what people really want.” This means Tesla gets a lot of man-hours for its benefits packages, especially up front.
“Wives and children don’t see [employees] for at least a year,” Randall says. “I mean, they literally disappear, working 80-hour workweeks.” Eventually the whole unit is brought into the fold through company functions and couples-accessible open enrollment, so “hopefully the family can start to buy into the idea that Tesla is a lifestyle, and it actually makes your life much better.”
In addition, companywide universal health care is huge asset, Randall says, when it comes to global recruiting. High-skilled talent from Germany or France may take free medicine as a “given,” and offering it can be essential.
Of course, the Tesla experiment might not function at every company, and even at Tesla, it is still an experiment. Only time will tell if the rapidly expanding automaker can offer the same benefits experience to 5,000 workers, or 50,000.
“If I come back here in two years and it doesn’t work,” Randall quipped, “somebody has to offer me a job.”
