Benefits/Work Flexibility

Benefits are critical to our goal of enabling employees to build a great life and career at Bridgewater. This commitment has translated into a portfolio of industry-leading offerings that are great for every employee, including working mothers and fathers. They address broad elements of work life integration and allow people to focus on their careers and families, without having to worry about medical expenses and retirement security, and provide support for both periods of pronounced hardship (times of loss, mental and/or physical stress, etc.) and everyday life.

We started with areas that touched all employees and where we saw potential for immediate impact:

• Flexible work: It was clear to us that flexibility was a critical investment in the sustainability of our business. Employees needed the permission to do it and the technology and norms to make it a good By 2018, 90%+ of employees could work from home up to 20% of the time.
• 401(k) plans: We materially increased our match to $15,000/year with an immediate, full The costs were significant and required tradeoffs, but so was the impact on employees’ ability to one day retire in security.
• Paid leave: Next came our suite of paid leaves — parental, medical, and Our old leave policy was to prorate bonuses. We switched to full bonus on leave because part of having a great life and career is the ability to focus on leave without worrying about finances.

Our next changes were narrower in scope, but critical to living our values around diversity and inclusion:

• We expanded our bereavement leave so that employees could take leave for deaths related to any relationship, in recognition that meaningful relationships come in many forms.
• We equalized parental leave among all new parents regardless of gender or path to parenthood (with additional medical recovery time for those who give birth). We added fertility coverage for those wishing to become parents via IVF, adoption, and/or egg freezing which is especially important for LGBTQ+ families, as well as a ramp-back program to allow new parents to work part-time, and backup dependent care.
• We also added concierge medical assistance to support those spending large amounts of time dealing with serious and/or chronic illnesses for themselves or their dependents. 

We then looked at our PTO policy. It previously combined all types of paid time off into one bank. This was good for flexibility, but the downside could be people working sick to not use up vacation time:

• We ultimately decided to move to an unlimited sick day benefit, in addition to existing vacation days, because no one should feel like they have to come to work even mildly sick, with the confidence and trust that our employees would use the benefit with integrity and care. 

Our people regularly cite these updates to benefits as a key reason for choosing to join and stay at Bridgewater. In addition to positive internal feedback, we have also received positive external recognition of these efforts – including mentions by FundFire and Power to Fly and earning a top score (100) from the Corporate Equality Index as a Top Workplace for LGBTQ+ Talent.