Free food and office snacks may be a familiar feature of workplace perks packages, but new research suggests they are not what employees are talking about most.
An analysis of 2,000 job adverts and company career pages, alongside more than 1,000 employee reviews and workplace discussions, found a gap between the benefits employers promote and those employees discuss themselves.
The research, conducted by office furniture company NAVO, compared the perks advertised by employers with the benefits mentioned by employees across 15 workplace benefit categories. Employee discussions were analysed across platforms including Glassdoor, Indeed and Reddit.
Health benefits top the list
Health benefits topped the ranking, with 124 mentions, closely followed by wellbeing initiatives (122) and flexible and remote working (111). Paid leave came next, with 101 mentions, followed by financial and retirement benefits (90) and learning and development (75). Mental health benefits ranked seventh, with 57 mentions.
Standing desks and ergonomic workstations ranked eighth, with 56 mentions, while life and disability insurance followed in ninth place with 35. Desks and chairs rounded out the top 10, with 31 mentions.
The research found differences between the benefits employers promote and those employees discuss themselves.
Flexible and remote working featured prominently in employer job adverts, while employee discussions also placed greater emphasis on practical aspects of the working environment, including ergonomics and wellbeing.
Standing desks and ergonomic workstations provided one of the clearest examples. Of the 56 mentions recorded, 45 came from employees compared with 11 from employers.
The analysis also identified 11 employee discussions criticising gimmicky office perks, with employees instead highlighting benefits connected to comfort, flexibility and their everyday working experience.
The difference is particularly interesting when comparing traditional office perks with the physical working environment.
Free food and snacks may be an easy benefit for companies to promote, but they appeared at the bottom of the ranking, with just six mentions in the employee reviews and workplace discussions analysed. By comparison, standing desks and ergonomic workstations received 56 mentions, including 45 from employees.
The findings do not suggest that employees universally value ergonomic equipment more highly than perks such as free food. Instead, they point to a broader difference between the benefits companies choose to promote and the practical aspects of work that employees actually discuss.
A free lunch may be an occasional perk, while a desk or workstation is something an employee interacts with throughout the working day. The data suggests that these less visible aspects of the workplace can sometimes feature more prominently in employee conversations than their presence in employer messaging would suggest.
Saim Damudi, Founder of NAVO, said the research showed that employers and employees do not always focus on the same workplace benefits. โCompanies are working harder than ever to attract and retain talented people, but our analysis suggests employers and employees don’t always focus on the same workplace benefits.
โEmployees are talking most about benefits that support their health, wellbeing and day-to-day working experience. Understanding what people actually discuss can help employers build benefits packages that feel more relevant to today’s workforce.โ
For employers, the findings could provide another way of assessing the effectiveness of their benefits offering: by looking not only at what they promote, but also at what employees actually discuss.
That could reveal gaps between an employer’s recruitment messaging and the lived workplace experience.
The research comes as organisations continue to reassess how they attract and retain employees, while many are also reviewing hybrid working and return-to-office policies.
Workplace perks have become an increasingly visible part of employer branding, with companies using everything from flexible working and wellbeing initiatives to office food and other benefits to compete for talent.
But the findings suggest that the benefits that are easiest to advertise are not necessarily the ones employees talk about most.
There is no single workplace perk that will appeal equally to every employee, and priorities will vary according to individual circumstances, roles and workplaces.
However, the research points to a simple distinction between what looks good in a job advert and what employees experience in their working lives. For employers, that may mean looking beyond the headline perks and paying closer attention to what their own employees are actually saying about work.
