How We Started
When we started down this path, we had what now turns out to have been a simplistic view. Our learning came in seeing what it is to live with the stress, the lack of a safety net, and the day-to-day crises that are part of the reality of economically fragile people. We realized that we had to go slowly, tread lightly, and go much broader and deeper in providing support for this talented group of people if we were going to help them actually achieve their goals and be successful.
Dasher provides compensation and traditional benefits along with an ever-growing variety of non-traditional benefits that help our team members create a life outside of work that enables them to come to work and thrive.
Benefits and More
Traditional benefits include health, disability, vision, and dental insurances; 401K with a generous match; and paid time off. Dasher pays a substantial portion of the cost of traditional benefits so that our employees can afford to opt for insurance coverage. We take exceptional care to make sure that the insurance coverage requires modest out-of-pocket participation so that employees can use their benefits to be as healthy as possible.
Dasher provides the full benefits package to full-time employees and part-time employees who work at least 24 hours a week, guaranteeing Dasher an advantage in attracting and retaining part-time workers.
How to implement Dasher’s non-traditional benefits is explained in our book. In broad terms, we address financial wellness, along with the wellbeing of the employee. We don’t force anything on people. Changing life behaviors is difficult. Each person has the freedom to engage with what’s being offered at their own pace. Or opt not to participate.
One financial wellness tool we provide to employees at no cost is SmartDollar™, an online financial wellness program. We also help each employee, who wants to, to establish a personal emergency fund bank account. Dasher adds a generous amount to each employee’s emergency fund bank account savings.
Other non-traditional benefits include our Gotcha program that provides cash rewards and our donor-directed fund that offsets the costs for catastrophic events that often cause low wage economically fragile people to lose their jobs.
We also offer to our workforce a daily routine for helping inspire happiness and reduce stress. Dasher’s Wellness Practice offers four components: meditation, thinking of others, writing in a gratitude journal and movement, which can be done each day.
In our next blog entry, we discuss how long it may take to get measurable results from your efforts to help low wage economically fragile people.
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You can also subscribe to Dasher’s video blog on LinkedIn, titled 90 Seconds. Each week we have a different guest talking about the importance of helping economically fragile workers be successful in their life and their career.