If you want to attract the top talent in a competitive market you have to spare no expense. That means providing the very best amenities and workplace experience, from barista-quality coffee and free soft drinks to hot cooked meals, breakout spaces and health and fitness facilities.
When your team has great coffee on tap, fresh meals and healthy snacks to hand, health and fitness facilities to keep them active and quiet spaces to focus or recharge, they are happier, healthier and far more likely to stay.
If you are ready to spare no expense in attracting the best talent on the market, read on for the ten amenities every modern office should offer to win and keep the best people.
The Workplace Defines the Top Employers
Competition for the best people has never been sharper. Skilled candidates compare far more than salary: they look at how an employer treats its people day to day, and the workplace itself is the most visible evidence of that.
Employees are clear about what they value, and food and drink comes up again and again. A Peldon Rose survey of 1,000 UK adults ranked free refreshments such as tea, coffee and soft drinks joint top of the features that make an office more appealing, and found 56% of workers feel their current office does not meet their needs.
Eurest's research found 73% of employees in businesses with a workplace restaurant would speak highly of their employer, compared with 64% where there isn't one. And Hays found 45% of workers wanted free or subsidised food, yet only 32% of employers offered it.
The message is consistent. People are not asking for slides and ping-pong tables. They want an employer that takes care of the everyday, and they notice which ones do.
10 Workplace Perks To Offer The Top Talent
1. Barista-Quality Coffee, on the House
Coffee is the amenity people use most often, so it is the one they judge you on most often. A jar of instant and a tired filter jug sends a message, and it isn't a good one. Fresh, well-made coffee, available whenever your team wants it, tells them their day matters.
For most offices, the easiest way to deliver this is a high-quality self-service machine. A bean-to-cup machine such as the Pulse 200 lets staff make everything from an espresso to a flat white at the touch of a button. Two bean hoppers mean a decaf can sit alongside your main blend, and a powder module serves hot chocolate, matcha and chai. Its milk system produces both hot and cold foam, so iced lattes are on the menu too.
Some employers go a step further. A compact traditional espresso machine and grinder gives coffee-loving teams the chance to make their own barista-style drinks, and quickly becomes a social focal point. Larger offices, with enough people to warrant it, can install a small staffed café inside the building, with trained baristas serving the team throughout the day. That is about as close to sparing no expense as coffee gets.
Whichever route you choose, the benefit is the same. One survey of more than 2,000 office workers estimated that nipping out to buy a drink takes around 16 minutes a trip, adding up to roughly a full working week each year, and over eight in ten respondents said free drinks at work would make them feel valued.
2. A Fully Stocked Hot and Cold Drinks Offer
Not everyone drinks coffee, and not everyone wants it hot. A complete drinks offer covers quality teas and herbal infusions, hot chocolate, chilled and sparkling water, juices, soft drinks and, increasingly, iced coffee. In the same survey, iced coffee was drunk at work by 64% of respondents, tea by 62% and juice by 55%.
Fridges stocked with free soft drinks, sparkling water and juices sit naturally alongside the hot drinks offer, and mean nobody ever needs to nip out to the shop or reach for their wallet.
3. Fresh Fruit, Healthy Snacks and Protein Bars
The mid-afternoon slump is real, and what fills it matters. A well-stocked snack station with fresh fruit, nuts, yoghurts and protein bars keeps energy steady without the sugar crash that follows a trip to the vending machine.
It also caters for a workforce with very different routines. Someone heading to the gym after work, someone who skipped breakfast and someone on a back-to-back meeting day all have their needs met without leaving their desk.
4. A Proper Breakfast
Breakfast is one of the cleverest investments an employer can make, because it changes behaviour at the start of the day. A free hot breakfast gives people a reason to arrive early rather than grab something on the way in, and it creates a relaxed, informal moment where teams naturally gather before the diary takes over.
Few things set the tone for a working day quite so well, or say quite so clearly from the very first hour that the business is looking after its people.
5. A Free, Fresh Lunch and Salad Bar
Lunch is where the daily cost of work hits hardest, particularly in London, and taking it off the table is one of the most valued things an employer can do. In Eurest's research, a free onsite restaurant appealed to 71% of workers, ranking alongside free coffee and snacks as one of the most popular workplace features it tested.
A free salad bar alongside hot dishes adds a fresh, healthy option that suits almost every dietary preference. And a shared lunch is one of the simplest ways to bring people together across teams and departments.
Taking care of meals also lifts a weight people rarely notice until it is gone. Deciding what to eat, when to get it and what to cook later is a constant background task. Remove it and your team saves money, eats better because the healthy option is now the easy one, and gets back the headspace to focus on their work.
6. Dinner, Served On Site
This is where an employer truly spares no expense. Serving a hot evening meal removes one of the biggest pressures on a working day: getting home, finding the energy to cook and paying for the ingredients. For people working late, juggling busy lives or simply living alone, it is a genuine quality-of-life improvement.
It also suits your most driven people. Nobody should be told to stay late, but the hardest workers often want to stay and finish what they have started. A hot dinner on site makes that the easy choice, rather than one that means a missed meal or a cold takeaway at the desk.
Above all, it is a strong retention tool. When your workplace looks after people from first coffee to final meal, the decision to move to another employer becomes much harder to justify.
7. A Café-Style Social Hub
The best workplaces put food and drink at the heart of a space where people actually want to be. A café-style hub with comfortable seating, good lighting and great coffee becomes the place where conversations happen, ideas get shared and new starters meet the rest of the business.
This matters because a sense of belonging is a big part of why people stay with an employer. Eurest found 68% of workers miss the social interaction the workplace provides. A well-designed hub gives that interaction somewhere to happen.
8. Quiet and Wellbeing Spaces
Not every hour in the office should be loud and collaborative. People need somewhere to focus, take a private call or simply decompress. Cushman & Wakefield's research found that among employees who believe the office should support their wellbeing, only 55% feel it actually does, and it highlights quiet and private work as a key driver.
A mix of focus booths, phone pods and a calm wellbeing room costs relatively little floor space and makes the office work for introverts and deep thinkers as well as the naturally sociable.
9. Fitness, Showers and Active Travel Facilities
Showers, changing rooms, secure bike storage and, where space allows, an on-site gym or fitness studio make it easy for people to build exercise into their working day. Eurest found 55% of workers would visit the workplace more often with a fitness centre or gym.
These facilities rarely win the talent argument on their own, but they are increasingly expected as standard in quality buildings. Think of them as the foundation that the food and drink offer is built on.
10. Outdoor and Event Space
A roof terrace, garden or courtyard gives people fresh air and a change of scene, while a flexible event space hosts town halls, client evenings, training and celebrations. Both are in high demand and short supply. Valve's data shows event space features in 89% of tenant demand yet is available in just 23.4% of Zone 1 buildings, while outdoor space is linked to 88.4% of demand but found in only 27.9% of office stock.
Pair either with good food and drink service and you have spaces that make your workplace somewhere people are proud to bring guests.
Start Simple, With Great Coffee
If there is one place to begin, it is coffee. It is the amenity used by the most people, the most often, and the first thing your team reaches for each morning. Sadly, many offices are serving a bitter, dark roasted coffee that doesn't come close to the quality of your nearby cafés.
For most offices, the simplest way to get it right is a Pulse bean-to-cup machine. It serves everything from espresso to iced lattes at the touch of a button, with a second bean hopper for decaf and hot chocolate, matcha and chai for the non-coffee drinkers. Fill it with our Roots specialty coffee, roasted in-house and traceable back to the farms we buy from, and your team gets café-quality coffee every day. A service and maintenance plan then keeps it running, so the machine is always ready when your people are.
If you want the best talent, you have to spare no expense, and great coffee is the easiest place to start. Talk to the Bridge Coffee Roasters team about building a coffee offer your people will genuinely look forward to.
