Throughout my career, I’ve had the good fortune to work for avariety of industry leading organizations from stratosphericstartup Tesla Motors to Fortune 100s Safeway and WashingtonMutual.

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I planted myself knee deep in managing, analyzing, and creatingeverything related to employee benefits and have learned more thana few finer points along the way.

The common thread across these three companies was a genuinedesire and drive to apply innovative, forward-thinking approachesto change and improve the way employee benefits are delivered.

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I’ve reflected on my experiences to give you three takeawaysthat helped these companies make the biggest impact possible withtheir benefits and employee experience programs.

Innovation isn’t easy

Much has been written about long work hours. Stories abound ofpeople sleeping in their cars or under their desks and subsistingon Top Ramen and frozen vegetables. That might exist for you atsome point along the path, but that’s not the type of innovativeenvironment that I’m talking about here. I am talking about anatmosphere that applies a conscious drive for change which can leadto meaningful acceptance of new ideas.

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Whether you’re rethinking the value of the way health insuranceis delivered to families or trying to disrupt a 100-year-oldautomotive industry, mindfully striving for innovation isn’t acakewalk.

That’s because humans are programmed not to like change, and formany, working through innovation doesn’t come naturally. It takes alaser-focused and cognizant decision to examine the way things aretraditionally or typically done. To do that, you’ll need to gatherdata, build a team, prove a case, influence, iterate, fail, and toachieve success, you’ll need to do all of these things quickly withminimal errors and missteps.

In my experience, it all comes down to the team that yousurround yourself with. When hiring or building your team, I alwaysadvise to think creatively about your problems and look for passionin those you recruit. More important than having “done it before”is an intense drive to solve problems and an underlying interest inthe core subject.

Early in my career at Tesla, an HR manager said to me, “thereare three reasons people come to Tesla. Either they are passionateabout cars, passionate about the environment, or passionate about their chosenprofession. And Tesla is the best place in the worldto be for all three of those things.” Notice there is nothing aboutmoney, benefits, or perks. That brings me to the second lesson I’velearned...

Top talent doesn’t care about perks (until you take themaway)

Rarely do candidates and their families make the decision tochange their lives — in some cases moving across the country orworld — because of the benefits and perks you offer.

Attracting top talent is about storytelling. It’s about having amission and purpose that a person (and his or her family) canidentify with through hard work. I have literally witnessedthousands of people join a common mission early on with little morethan unlimited cereal and coffee being offered as the perk. Andthis was in the geographic backyard of arguably the most intensecompany perk culture on the planet in Silicon Valley. At the end ofthe day, people want to feel like they are contributing tosomething bigger than themselves.

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Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to imply employees don’t careabout the benefits offered to them. They must be satisfied knowingthat the basics — health, disability, life insurance, andretirement — are covered. But in my experience, top talent doesn’tmake the decision to join a company because of free lunches andmassages on Wednesdays.

Keeping that in mind, it is extremely important to constructbenefits and perks with careand thought. Once implemented, any experienced HR manager will tellyou his or her sad tale of trying to take something away thatpeople are accustomed to.

It’s also imperative to align benefits with perks. Trust me,employees notice if either appears alien to the company culture andmission. I learned this lesson at Safeway during a program thatlinked the amount of premium a person paid for health insurance totheir biometric measures like blood pressure and cholesterol.Employees scratched their heads wondering why the company cafeteriafeatured cheap burgers and sodas in comparison to the healthy (butpricey) salad bar if poor eating habits could potentially equate tohigher health insurance premiums. To promote the healthy lunchoptions, we had to align its costs with the culture we were tryingto foster.

Silicon Valley has become legendary for perks and what many ofmy colleagues across the country consider frivolous and extravagantbenefits. While I agree that many of the Valley’s largest and mosticonic brands along with many wannabe cool kids are foolishlywasting time, resources, and money on programs that really do notserve any identifiable goal, I will argue that offering smartlyaligned, personalized benefits and perks are the wave of thefuture. And that brings me to my third and final take-away...

Let the people choose

We have a lot of choice in our lives. We choose the items, pricepoints, and brands to put into our carts when shopping at Safeway.Every Tesla purchase is made to order, built to the specificrequirements of the buyer. Google organizes information to make itindividualized and useful. Amazon provides a personalized onlineshopping experience. Uber and Airbnb tap into excess individualcapacity in existing systems to create value. We all havedifferent needs, priorities, family situations, and interests, sois it so difficult to offer benefits that can be personalized,too?

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The traditional way of offering limited choice employee benefitsand perks for everyone (i.e., group benefits) is outdated andbloated with waste. Upwards of 30 percent of compensation costs arefunneled to these traditional benefits and American companies spendover a trillion and a half dollars on these inefficient benefitsper year.

And that doesn’t even include any so-called perks. In my ownresearch, most employers are paying anywhere from $7,000 to $25,000per year for a single traditional benefits package. That’s a hugechunk of change and much of those benefits will never be used bythe individual if it doesn’t apply to their situation or they findno personal value in it.

Instead of these antiquated and engorged traditional benefits,smart people are creating systems and methods whereby employees canbuild personalized benefits packages that meet individual needs andcircumstances. Giving people the choice and ability to craft whatthey need can and will make a real difference in people’s dailylives.

Adoption by forward-leaning employers along with regulatorycooperation will finally result in a system for employee benefitsand perks that is modern, flexible, and valued. A system that lookslike the rest of our world: personalized.