More and more businesses are thinking of strategies to make flexible work models easier for everyone, gain a competitive edge in their industry, and increase employee retention.
This exercise in motivating employees and keeping top talent happy has brought more companies to offer Employee Meals. In fact, according to a recent DoorDash survey, 85% of employees say regular food delivery would increase their job satisfaction.
As you compare DoorDash to. Seamless orGrubHub corporate accounts, it's important to think how DoorDash for Business will add value to your organization.
How do Employee Meals provide an effective ROI?
The right benefits at work are increasingly becoming one of the few elements that can make a business stand out and attract and retain top talent. Food delivery programs like DoorDash’s Employee Meals take away meal-related stress from your employees' busy to-do lists and enable them to focus on their core tasks, directly impacting your organization's productivity. Studies have shown the impact food can have on your employees every day.
When your employees are hungry, they’re not doing their best work. Even though the human brain is only 2% of our body weight, it's the primary consumer of glucose in the body, using 20% of glucose-derived energy. In fact, skipping breakfast reduces short term memory and cognitive performance, decreasing productivity in important early morning work hours. And that goes for lunch as well. If your team’s brain doesn’t have enough fuel, it’s likely that employees’ focus will decrease significantly.
Between brainstorming what you actually want to eat, getting all the ingredients, preparing the meal and washing up, cooking takes forever! It’s not surprising that so many people have gotten sidetracked and misstepped at work due to having to prepare a meal. A recent DoorDash survey found that 49% of those surveyed said they’ve had at least one work failure, including missing a deadline, a call, or other work matter, due to a need to prep food for themselves or family. That means likely half of your employees have had moments where they’ve had to choose between feeding themselves well or fulfilling their responsibilities at work.
What are DoorDash for Business Employee Meals?
Employee Meals are a great way of taking care of your team and supporting them by taking a time-consuming item off their to-do list. And it's no wonder–a healthy team is a productive team. By feeding your workforce with highly customizable meal budgets, you can save money, improve performance, and retain top talent. Here are a few recommended resources for a happier, healthier, and more productive workforce:
With Expensed Meals, setting a budget for your employees to order what they want has never been easier. All you have to do is enroll your employees in an expensed meals benefit program and set automatic one-time or recurring budgets. This way, your employees can order meals anytime, anywhere they work. Whether they need a lunch to have while at the office or they're working late on a deadline remotely, they can choose from 450,000+ local restaurants. By implementing an employee meal program with a monthly food ordering stipend, you'll show your employees you value them while boosting productivity.
How do Expensed Meals work?
An Expensed Meals program is not only a great investment in your workforce, but is also simple to use. You can pick eligible employees, set ordering hours, and assign spending limits in the DoorDash for Business Admin Portal. Employees don't even need to save receipts. Instead, meals are automatically invoiced or billed to the company account, streamlining the whole process. In addition to centralized invoicing, DoorDash has also enabled SAP Concur Integration so your employees can easily access restaurants for a business lunch, while you can track spending across your entire organization. Here’s how it works step by step:
Designate eligible employees, set ordering hours, and assign spending limits by employee or group.
Employees simply log in to DoorDash with their work email and add items to their cart. This can be done via their desktop or on the DoorDash mobile app.
Orders are billed to the company account, enhancing your tools for compliance and budgeting.
How DashPass for Employees increases retention
As hybrid work models take center stage, finding new ways to support employees while building community are crucial. DashPass for Employees allows eligible participants to subscribe and enjoy unlimited $0 delivery fees and reduced service fees, saving your employees time and money, while enabling them to actually relax during lunchtime. And you save money too: by bundling DashPass for Employees with Expensed Meals your company will save 15% to 29% in savings on meal budgets between $15 and $35.
When your team feels supported, they are better able to focus on their work. As people increasingly seek out work experiences that align with their needs and values, providing them with resources that will make their everyday life easier and more enjoyable is key to employee retention. By offering your workforce DashPass for Employees, you’re not only investing in employee wellbeing, but also in your bottom line.
What are some ways to use Employee Meals?
1. Incentivize a return to the office
With 83% of workers saying they prefer a hybrid model, making it easier for your employees to come into the office is a must to stay competitive as an employer. Offering Employee Meals is a great way to incentivize those in your workforce who are returning to the office. When setting it up, you can choose for deliveries to be sent only to your office address, so employees can only use the benefit when working in-person.
2. Host a team meal during an important meeting
Has everyone been working late on quarterly planning or budgeting? Whether in the office or working remotely, bring your team together to enjoy a meal together. According to Kiran Lingam, Co-Founder of TechGC, offering Employee Meals was a big success internally: "We use Doordash for all of our virtual meetings and our employees and members love it! The team there has been great to work with and has provided us with top-notch support and service.”
3. Treat a customer to an individual meal during a Zoom meeting
Sharing a meal is a time-honored tradition that goes back to the dawn of time and helps strengthen relationships. It’s a fact: groups that eat together perform better. According to a Cornell University study, “From an evolutionary anthropology perspective, eating together has a long, primal tradition as a kind of social glue. That seems to continue in today’s workplaces.” The study was conducted within firehouses in large cities to explore the role that interacting over food might have for work-group performance. The findings established that there is a significant improvement in performance by leveraging the mundane and powerful activity of eating together.
4. Offer team dinner when employees have to work late
Letting someone put in extra time too often without showing them appreciation might send the wrong signal and not feeding your employees in certain situations might even be the final straw. Recently, a photographer deleted a couples' wedding photos after she was denied a break to get something to eat and drink. “I was told I cannot stop to eat because I need to be a photographer. In fact, they didn’t save me a spot at any table,” the photographer said. The groom also told the photographer that she could not leave to get food. Needless to say, the photographer reached her tipping point after 6 hours of working straight.
This viral moment highlights the importance of showing gratitude through a meal to employees who are going the extra mile. It lets your employees know you not only appreciate their hard work, but also care about their wellbeing.
4 Reasons to Choose DoorDash for Business Employee Meals
1. DoorDash for Business saves time and drives efficiency
Gone are the days of scanning receipts, manually entering them into a database for each order, and having to manually track meal budgets for all employees. With Employee Meals you can set your budgets and track spending all in one place.
Having a single, centralized meal portal can save your company hundreds of hours each year, especially when trying to standardize a program across your large workforce. Use the Admin Portal to set parameters. Then, employee meals are automatically expensed to the company account. This will save time on accounting by having everything in one place. Your accounting department can find itemized receipts in your admin portal for audits, use the integration with Concur so that expense reports are a thing of the past, and mandate expense codes on each order to assign meals to appropriate cost centers.
2. DoorDash for Business is the most competitive & cost-effective solution
Want to know specifically how you save? Here’s how:
a. Service Fees: These are the fees we charge every customer who avails from our marketplace. On average, DoorDash charges lower service fees than many of its competitors.
b. Delivery Fees: This is the cost incurred to facilitate the delivery of your employee meals. While this varies depending on the restaurant and distance to the drop-off location, it is on average ~$3.99, in line with our competitors.
c. Flexible Budgets: Get refunded for funds you don’t use. Unlike gift cards, if your employees don’t use the recurring or one-time budget by the end of the time-frame you choose, you’ll get the unused money back.
d. Bundle and Save: Bundling Discounted Corporate Rates with Expensed Meals makes your dollar go further, generating 15% to 29% in savings on meal budgets between $15 and $35. Your employees save money too. When they’re too busy with work to cook, a DashPass for Employees membership saves them on average $4-$5 per delivery.
3. DoorDash for Business is the market leader, maximizing your options
As the #1 food and drink app on the App Store with over 450k+ restaurants across the country to choose from, employees have access to whatever dish their heart desires. Whether they want a healthy sushi lunch or comforting pasta for working late at night, the options are numerous to say the least. Employees across your organization working from anywhere can use it and all those accounts and budgets can be managed from a single dashboard, making it easy to track and manage.
4. DoorDash for Business has an easy-to-use platform that helps with budget compliance
Compliance can be tricky to ensure if you don't have the right tools at your disposal. With the DoorDash for Business platform, you can enforce employee compliance of the specific meal policy you designed. This means you can customize your meal policy to only allow orders during certain days and times, or prevent budget use on alcohols or groceries, removing a manual need to double check compliance.
Also, any overages are covered by the employee during the checkout process. On their experience using DoorDash for Business, Boston-based tech company, Portal Instruments said: "DoorDash's new platform that allows employers and employees to pay a share of the cost is amazing. [...] The choice of restaurants is extensive and can be catered to your company's likes and dislikes. I highly recommend them!”
What are some of the products in the Admin Portal?
With the Admin Portal, you have a one-stop shop for all your meal solution needs. To manage DoorDash for Business Employee Meals, leverage the Admin Portal, a comprehensive platform where administrators can create expensed meal budgets and invite employees to activate meal benefits. Add or remove employees, allocate meal budgets, download invoices and more all from the DoorDash for Business Admin Portal.
It’s easy to get started with some of the portal’s features:
Go to Doordash.com and sign in with your company email. Click Benefits under the hamburger menu and then click Go to Admin Portal.
In the Employees Tab - you can add employees to an account. Once an employee is added, click the menu icon next to the employee for more options.
If you want to set specific parameters for specific teams, you can in the Groups tab. If you would like to add a group this feature is available in the Groups tab. Here, you can add a group and organize meal budgets. Simply click Create Group and enter a group name and optional description. To add members, click the menu next to the group name and select Add Members.
In the Payment Methods tab you can view payment methods that have been added to the account.
The Meals Budgets tab allows you to create meal budgets for your employees. Budgets can be set as one-time or recurring, be applied to all employees or specific groups and restricted to be available only on specific days or at certain times.
Want to find out how much you’ve spent? Head over to the Order History Tab. Here, you can download monthly order history reports.
If you need help getting started, visit our Support Center where you can find helpful how-to articles or call us at 855-830-5429 6am-10pm MST for live support.
What are the other benefits of Employee Meals?
Building a healthy company culture that actively improves employee motivation starts with the basics — sharing a meal. Expanding HR benefits to areas like nutrition, mental health, and mindfulness is especially important especially when it comes to starting a new year with the right foot after two difficult ones. Your employees' improved wellbeing has a direct impact on boosting morale, increasing productivity, and decreasing turnover.
Here are some of the benefits of Employee Meals that will have a positive ripple effect across your entire business:
Improve productivity: When working late on an important project, your employees already have a lot on their plate and little time to prepare a meal. In fact, 56% of employees felt that food benefits would increase their productivity.
Improve performance: Low blood sugar makes employees extra stressed. Nearly half of employees have had at least one work failure–missing a deadline, a call, or other work matter–because they needed to prep food.
Build a company culture of gratitude: According to the 2020 DoorDash for Business Customer Analysis, 88% of companies believe food helps employees feel valued and 63% of companies with a robust food program in place have seen a positive impact on company culture.
Attract and retain top talent: Keep in mind, 55% of American workers said they would be jealous if they heard their friends or family received workplace food benefits.
Improve employee happiness: Around 1 in 3 employees at businesses with under 10 employees said food perks would help them save money—compared to around 1 in 4 at companies over 1000 employees. Employees at large businesses reported a greater need to save time with food perks.
Reduce stress: In a 2021 DoorDash for Business survey, 82% of respondents stated that food delivery saved them time, providing more time to recharge.
Improve employee wellbeing and health: A recent ILO report, found that a healthy diet alone can raise productivity levels by up to 20%.
Next Step? Switch to DoorDash for Business' Employee Meals
As you brainstorm new ways to keep your employees motivated, consider what would make their life easier as they begin 2022. As flexible work models increase in popularity, it’s important to provide incentives for those employees coming into the office. Sharing a meal with your team will ultimately help you improve company culture as well as team building.
Employee Meals is a resource specifically designed to help support work/life balance, flexible work models, and show your employees appreciate their hard work. Not only does Employee Meals save your employees time and money, but it’s also good for your business, boosting productivity, and increasing employee happiness.
Contact us to find out more about enrolling in DooDash for Work Employee Meals.
