I’m writing this from the hospital today. A family member is in long-term hospice and today is one of those days where nothing else matters.

I didn’t file paperwork. I didn’t check the employee handbook for policies. I didn’t calculate how many days I had available or worry about coverage plans.

I told my team I needed to go. They said go. My leaders said the same thing. They’d handle everything else.

That response, that immediate, unconditional support, isn’t in any benefits package. It’s not listed on the company website or mentioned in recruiting materials. But it’s worth more than any salary bump or stock option I’ve ever received.

The Benefits No One Talks About

Every company lists the tangible benefits: health insurance, 401(k) matching, PTO, flexible work arrangements. These matter, obviously. But they’re table stakes now.

What separates good workplaces from exceptional ones are the intangible benefits—the unwritten ones that only reveal themselves when life gets hard.

Can you leave when your kid’s sick without a guilt trip? When your parent is dying, do you spend emotional energy on work logistics or on being present? When you’re struggling with your mental health, can you actually say that?

I’ve worked in enough places to know this isn’t universal. I’ve seen organizations where every absence requires justification, where leaders track who track the “Teams status dot”, where flexibility exists on paper but earns you subtle penalties in practice.

Those organizations will tell you they care about work-life balance. They’ll point to their generous PTO policies. But culture isn’t what you write in the handbook, it’s what happens when someone actually needs to use it.

What Creates This Culture

After 20+ years across aviation, education, fintech, and startups, I’ve observed some interesting patterns about organizations that actually support their people.

They trust by default. When someone says they need time, the assumption is they’re telling the truth. There’s no interrogation, no proof required, no suspicious follow-up questions. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership found that teams with high psychological safety report higher performance and lower interpersonal conflict—and that starts with basic trust.

Leadership models the behavior. It’s not enough for your manager to say “take care of yourself.” If your VP never takes time off, if your director responds to emails at 11 PM, if your senior leaders brag about working through illness, that’s the real policy. People watch what leaders do, not what they say.

Systems support humans, not the other way around. In education, we served 50,000+ students with minimal resources. When someone needed to leave for a family emergency, we had backup plans—not because we anticipated every crisis, but because we built systems assuming humans would have human needs. The absence of one person never became an organizational crisis.

There’s no “earning” flexibility. Some companies treat flexibility as something you unlock with tenure or performance. That’s backwards. Everyone has a life outside work. Everyone will eventually face something hard. Requiring people to prove they’re “valuable enough” to be treated humanely creates exactly the wrong incentives.

The Hidden Cost of the Alternative

Companies that don’t build this kind of culture pay for it in ways they rarely measure, but always feel.

People stay physically but leave mentally. They show up while their parent is dying because they’re afraid not to, but they’re not actually working—they’re just performing presence. Research on psychological safety shows that employees who feel psychologically safe report greater job satisfaction and significantly fewer negative outcomes like emotional exhaustion and burnout.

The best people leave. When you’re good at what you do, you have options. And once you’ve worked somewhere that treats you like a human being, it’s hard to go back to somewhere that doesn’t.

Innovation dies. People who are afraid to be vulnerable don’t take risks. They don’t admit mistakes. They don’t ask for help. They optimize for looking busy rather than being effective.

What to Look For

If you’re evaluating a team or company, here’s what I think really matters.

Watch how they talk about absences. Do people apologize for being human? Do they justify taking time off? Or do they just say “I need Thursday” and move on?

Ask about their worst day. In interviews, I ask candidates about a time they faced something hard personally. How did their team respond? You learn more from that answer than any question about “strengths and weaknesses.”

Look at leadership behavior. Do they model boundaries? Do they talk about their own struggles occasionally? Or do they project invulnerability?

Listen for “we’ve always done it this way.” The best cultures evolve. They ask whether their policies actually serve people or just satisfy compliance requirements.

To Leaders Building This

If you’re trying to create this kind of culture, start with candor, kindness, and trust.

Start with trust as the default. Every system you build should assume people are acting in good faith. When you design for the 2% who might abuse flexibility, you punish the 98% who won’t.

Make it explicit. Don’t just allow flexibility—actively encourage it. Tell people to take time when they need it. Model it yourself. Call out and correct any subtle penalties for being human.

Build systems that accommodate reality. One person leaving shouldn’t create chaos. If it does, your problem isn’t that person—it’s your systems.

Measure what really matters. Track burnout, not just productivity. Ask whether people feel safe being honest about their struggles. Your best early indicator of cultural problems is people who are struggling but can’t say so.

I’m still figuring out how to build these cultures at scale. In startups, it’s easier—small teams naturally cover for each other. In large organizations, it requires intentional system design. But I’ve seen it work in companies of 10 and 10,000.

Back To What Really Matters

So, today, sitting in this hospital room, I’m not thinking about my last performance review or my career trajectory or whether I’m on track for promotion. I’m thinking about the people who made it possible for me to be exactly where I need to be, doing exactly what matters most.

That’s the benefit that matters. That’s the culture worth building. That’s what separates workplaces that treat you like a resource from ones that treat you like a human being.

When life gets hard—and it will—does your workplace culture make it easier or harder?

If you’re a leader, that’s the only question that really matters. Everything else is just details in a benefits package.