When Christina Le posted publicly on LinkedIn about mental health, burnout, and work-life balance, she didn’t expect her company to respond. Le, the head of marketing at social media content creation platform Slate, offered a small suggestion for executives: “If companies are enjoying refreshing benefits this year, here’s a free idea: Add a janitorial stipend.”
While health wages and gym benefits “are nice,” she wrote, “not everyone wants to spend their limited free time on a treadmill. For many of us, a clean house does more for our well-being than another obligation.” Le argued that a cleaning perk might be more “practical. It’s human. It takes one thing off the list.”
And to her surprise, her company not only responded, but moved quickly to add cleaning services as an employee benefit.
Didn’t say wealth she “really didn’t expect” the company to respond this way, especially since she had just started at the company just a few weeks ago.
“You hear a lot of organizations talk about valuing people and prioritizing culture, but Slate demonstrated it in a very real, very immediate way,” Le said. It was not performative. They didn’t think much of it. They listened and acted, which says a lot about how seriously they take their team.
In fact, it only took her company’s HR team a day to message Le to let her know they saw her suggestion and “we liked it,” and the management team agreed to add it as a benefit.
“It sparked a really good internal discussion, and the leadership team agreed that it made total sense for Slate, especially since we’re a completely remote team,” Pamela Lopez, human resources specialist at Slate, wrote in an internal message to Le. Employees receive this $200 benefit once a month and the funds are added to a Ramp card to use. Alternatively, employees can claim reimbursement.
Eric Stark, co-founder and president at Slate, said wealth that while home cleaning services weren’t something the management team had specifically discussed as a benefit in the past for its 40-person company, the idea stood out because of “how practical and human the suggestion was.”
“The bottom line is that you don’t need big, expensive programs to make a real difference,” Stark added. “Sometimes the most important benefits come from listening carefully to employees and removing friction from their lives.”
In addition to traditional health care and retirement benefits, Slate also offers employees $100 stipends that can go toward a monthly home office or coworking space, professional development, and a $200 monthly stipend that employees can use “that really improves their day-to-day well-being,” Stark said. They’ve also added an “AI enablement” grant that employees can use to explore and experiment with new AI tools.
“Instead of centralizing experiments or prescribing a single stack, we encourage employees to try emerging tools, learn what actually works in their role, and share that information with the team,” Stark said. “It was a practical way to build AI literacy within the company without forcing top-down adoption.”
Le’s post sparks discussion online about employee benefits
Le’s LinkedIn post received thousands of likes and hundreds of comments — and she also shared her story on TikTok. There it received nearly 60,000 likes and sparked discussion about how companies should approach employee benefits in the modern workplace.
Some people who identified as HR professionals commented that they wanted to suggest janitorial services as a benefit for their own companies, and others shared how their own companies allow them to use their health and wellness benefits for things like the gym, cleaning, tutoring, estate planning, home exercise equipment, and grocery delivery services.
She told them that the response she’s received from both her company and followers has been “incredibly positive.”
“The work is hard,” she said wealth. “We spend an enormous amount of our lives doing this, and it’s difficult to stay motivated when your relationship with your workplace seems purely transactional.
Especially working in technology, she added, her company is in a “privileged position to rethink what meaningful benefits actually look like — and to continue to evolve them as people’s lives and needs change.”
Rethinking health and wellness benefits
Over the past few years, many companies have tried to add health and wellness benefits to attract employees to keep them happy. While this works for some people, not everyone wants to spend their free time at a gym and have other things on their mind for what would really help their health and well-being. In fact, a 2025 employee benefits trends report from ADP shows that people prefer customizable benefits over generic plans that don’t address specific needs, and the human capital management company recommends regularly asking employees for feedback on the benefits they need and want.
“A lot of health benefits are framed as adding more to your schedule — go to the gym, book a class, make time for therapy,” Le said. “These things matter, but they don’t take away the daily mental load that people carry. Your house is still messy. Dinner has to happen. The logistics of childcare don’t go away.”
Instead, offering benefits like cleaning services helps reduce the amount of things people have to do during the 5-9, rather than piling on more. There is a lot of research in neuroscience and psychology that shows that a clean house can help reduce stress.
“When you take something off people’s plates, you give them real breathing room,” Le said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com