10 Great Benefits the Best Remote Companies Offer

24% of remote companies on RemoteHub have specified at least some benefits for their remote employees. Here are the TOP 10 perks that remote companies provide:

1. Health Insurance

It doesn’t matter if you’re working remotely or not, one of the most important benefits is probably health insurance. Currently, about 14% of the remote companies on RemoteHub offer medical insurance for their team.

When looking at the details, health benefits get confusing really fast. It seems that leading remote companies like Help Scout are usually offering 100% health and dental coverage for you and your family which seems to be one of the best options available, but not all companies are able to provide that level of insurance. Always check the details with the company – for example, it seems that some companies can offer health benefits for their US employees only.

Medical insurance is probably the hardest benefit to organize in a remote company when you have team members in so many different countries. It’s good to see that companies like SafetyWing are working on insurance products for the remote world – they are building a global social safety net tailored to the needs of online freelancers, entrepreneurs, and remote companies.

2. Company Retreats

You can work very effectively and get to know your team quite well by chatting in Slack and doing some video calls, but once you meet your team members in a retreat setting, something magical happens when you’re back – the conversations you have with your team members are enhanced. You know your team more deeply. You read their text messages differently.

While it can cost more than $100,000 to fly your distributed team together for a week, one of the leading remote company founders Joel Gascoigne says that retreats are not only a fun part of their culture, but an absolute necessity.

Remote teams often use their time on the retreat for fun activities and games to get to know each other better, but there’s also some work involved. See which distributed companies have available remote job roles right now.

3. Paid Vacation

Sometimes it can be hard for the employees to go on a vacation – maybe because very few people in their team go on vacations and it can seem weird to be one of the few or they don’t want to leave their work responsibilities for their team members while they are away.

But it’s quite obvious that humans need to completely switch off from work once in a while – constant working can lead to burnout very quickly.

It’s helpful to have a strict vacation policy so that everyone must go on a break. For the team, it’s also very helpful if they continue getting paid while on their vacation so it doesn’t have an effect on their family budget.

4. Flexible Working Hours

The ability to choose your own working hours is often considered to be the best benefit of remote work – when you’re not bound to the office, you can live your days more flexibly.

Obviously there are remote jobs where you need to be present for specific hours of the day (like customer support), but for example remote programming jobs can be usually done on your own schedule – as long as you’re doing a great job and you’ve earned your trust, companies are most often fine with this.

5. Learning Budget

Remote companies are encouraging their distributed team to keep growing with a dedicated learning budget. Here are some hightlights:

ConvertKit lets you pick any conference to attend and they’ll cover your ticket and travel

Kuali gives you $2,000/year for conferences, books, classes and other things that help you grow professinally

Buffer employees get a Kindle and free Kindle books whenever they want them (in 2017, Buffer’s team read 1,366 books – that’s 17 books per person)

6. Home Office Setup Budget

It’s important to keep your home office in order to stay productive – it can be very helpful when the remote company helps you to pay for the computer, desk and other equipment you may need at home. For example:

Get a laptop and $500 to set up your home office – Buffer

$2,500 every 2 years to refresh your hardware – ConvertKit

Standing desk, headphones and any other technology you need – WP Buffs

$4,000 to set up your home office – Hotjar

7. Flexible Vacation

It’s easier to plan your vacation when the remote company you work at can be flexible with the vacation time. It’s still probably a good idea to plan your vacations ahead of time and consider your team members – they will need to cover you while you’re away.

8. Pension

Time moves fast, right! So you probably want to be prepared for the old age. Like health insurance, this can be tricky though – in many cases you need to live in the US.

9. Equity

If you’re planning to be part of the remote company for a long-term (and you should be!), it can be helpful for your motivation to own a part of the company.

10. Unlimited Time-off

It can be helpful if there are no maximum vacation time specified and you can get some rest whenever you need it.

Although it seems that unlimited vacation time is not always enough to get the team out of their home office once in a while and remote companies seem to be starting to implement a minimum vacation policy instead.

To recognize companies with the best perks for remote work, we started to give out TOP benefit badges for remote companies with the following set of benefits:

️️ flexible working hours
️️ coworking budget
tech budget

This should also make it easier for you to find remote jobs with the best benefits and start working from home or anywhere else in the world.