What good people are worth

A benefit is a reason to stay

Employers are not sentimental about benefits. They buy them to keep people, and they will say so plainly. In the most recent CIPD reward survey, taken at the end of 2025, 44% of employers said their benefits are aimed at supporting retention and 37% at motivation and engagement.³ That is the job a benefit is bought to do, in their own words: keep good people, and keep them switched on.

The employees agree, from the other side of the desk. Asked why they leave a job, the single most common answer workers give is better pay and benefits, named by 35%.⁴ Be precise here: the honest version of this point is more persuasive than the inflated one. It is the biggest single reason people give for leaving, but it is not the reason most of them go. More leave over things that have little to do with the package: 27% want more job satisfaction, and similar numbers want better work-life balance or a different job.⁴ A good package will not, by itself, make someone want to stay, but it removes one of the easier reasons to leave, and that counts for a lot when the people you most want to keep are the ones with somewhere else to go.

The connection runs deeper than the exit interview. CIPD’s Good Work Index, which surveys around five thousand UK workers a year, finds that the people more satisfied with their pay also tend to report better mental health and less intention to leave.⁵ That is a correlation in a snapshot survey, not a controlled experiment, so read it as an association and not a lever you pull. It is a steady one, though, and it points where you would expect: the people who feel fairly looked after are the ones who tend to stay, and the ones worth keeping.

Wellbeing tracks the same way. About a quarter of UK workers, some 8.5 million people, say their work has a negative effect on their mental health. People in that group are more than twice as likely to say they may quit, at 37% against 14%, and far less satisfied with their job, at 54% against 93%.⁵ This is association again, not proof of cause. But the people a firm most wants to keep are rarely the ones quietly deciding to go, and the state a job leaves someone in is part of how they decide.

The gap between what is bought and what is felt

The catch is that employers think their benefits are landing better than their staff do. In CIPD’s reward research, 60% of employers said they offer a good benefits package; only 40% of employees said they were happy with what they got.⁶ That twenty-point gap matters, because it means the people paying for the benefits and the people receiving them are not even agreeing on whether they are any good.

The backdrop makes that harder to wave away. On Gallup’s long-running measure, just 10% of UK employees are engaged at work, below the European average of 12% and well short of the global 20%, with no change on the year.⁷ Nine in ten British workers are turning up without being engaged by the job. Whatever firms are spending to hold and motivate people, in the aggregate it is not reaching how they feel about their work.

A benefit nobody feels is, to the people it is meant for, much the same as no benefit at all.

The trouble is not too little spending, since plenty is being spent already; it is how little of it lands on anything people feel.

A benefit nobody opens

Take the most common piece of wellbeing provision in the country. Around seven in ten UK employers offer access to counselling or an Employee Assistance Programme; counselling sits at 71% and the EAP at 67% on CIPD’s 2025 list of benefits offered to all staff, and by industry counts the EAP reaches roughly three-quarters of the workforce.⁸ On paper, it is close to universal.

In practice, almost no one uses it. The independent surveys that have looked put EAP take-up at around 3 to 5% a year.⁹ So the benefit nearly every firm offers turns out to be one of the least used of all. There is no real contradiction there: a confidential line you ring when things have gone badly wrong is something you are glad exists and hope never to need. But if ninety-five people in a hundred never touch it in a year, it is doing more for the employer’s peace of mind than for anyone’s actual week. For most of the payroll it exists on paper and nowhere else.

There is a second reason the helpline goes unused, and it matters because the same flaw runs through a lot of wellbeing provision. Using it means putting your hand up and telling your employer’s chosen provider that you are not coping. In a market where jobs feel less secure than the people doing them would like, that is a lot to ask, and plenty of people quietly decline to. The fuller version of that argument, and what it means for an employer’s duty of care, sits in the regulatory case. For keeping good people the narrower point will do: a benefit is only worth something, as a reason to stay, when the people it is meant for will use it.

What makes massage different

Massage stands apart from the rest of the list in two ways. The first is that almost nobody offers it. In CIPD’s 2025 health and wellbeing survey, complementary therapies such as massage were the single least common benefit on the entire list: just 17% of organisations make them available to all staff, behind counselling at 71%, sick pay at 66%, and everything else.¹⁰ Among larger private-sector firms it climbs, but only to around a quarter. In a market where almost every competitor offers the same auto-enrolment pension and the same unopened helpline, a benefit that more than four firms in five do not have is a difference a good candidate notices, and one a current employee can feel the value of without having to be told.

The second is that people use it. Nobody rings a massage in a crisis; it is a booked hour in the working day that someone goes into and comes out of feeling better. It asks nothing of them first: no form to fill in, and no need to put your hand up as someone who is struggling. They just turn up, and they feel it, every time. It is the EAP problem in reverse, the rare benefit that the people who get it remember.

And it points straight at the thing employers say they are buying benefits for. When firms are asked what their wellbeing spending delivers, the single most common answer is better morale and engagement, named by 35%, ahead of every other reported outcome.¹¹ Engagement is the same measure currently stuck at 10% across the country. A benefit that people physically turn up for, that lands in the body on the day and again the next time, is a far more plausible lever on morale and engagement than one they scroll past in an induction pack.

A perk worth the name

So, is massage a perk? In the cheapened sense of the word, no. In the sense that decides whether good people stay, yes: a real benefit, one a firm pays for because it has decided those people are worth the money. What matters is less the cost than the decision the cost stands for, and the people on the receiving end can usually tell which of the two they are looking at.

It carries one advantage nothing else on the list does. Most of what sits on that list pays off at a distance, if at all. A pension matters in forty years; the unused helpline, never. A massage pays off the same afternoon, for the person on the table, and again the next time, and it is the rarest thing on the menu while it does it.

In a labour market where engagement is on the floor and most benefit spending never reaches the people it was meant for, a rare benefit that gets used and felt is not something to laugh at. It does the job a perk is supposed to do, which is more than the rest of the list can manage.