Many leadership teams can recite their benefits package from memory, often listing things like subsidised food, wellbeing programmes and training budgets. On paper, these benefits look generous, and in many cases, they are, but the reality is often that most employees can’t use the benefits.
For example, in many workplaces, the canteen closes at 3pm which is perfect for employees who work traditional office hours, but it leaves those on the night shift often going without away. The same goes for lunchtime yoga sessions or mental health drop-ins that run throughout the day shift but aren’t accessible for employees who don’t work typical hours.
Employees can’t use these workplace benefits because there is a problem with how they have been designed and set up.
Offering a benefit is not the same as making it available
There is a meaningful difference between offering a benefit and making it practically available. For example, the subsidized canteen that shuts before the night shift arrives is, for that shift, not a subsidised canteen, it is just yet another inaccessible perk and the scale of this gap is often bigger than many leaders assume. The Office for National Statistics reported that in 2022, 4% of the UK workforce usually worked during the evening or night but not during the day, and a further 23% worked during both daytime and evening or nighttime hours. That is more than a quarter of working people whose hours fall at least partly outside the window most workplace services are built around.
So, when the leadership teams review the workplace benefits, the discussions should not be focused on “what do we offer?” but whether all employees can access it during their working hours, is it relevant to every site and is it realistically going to be used by the employees.
On-site provision is part of operational infrastructure
In shift-based environments, decent staff facilities are not a nice extra added on top of the operation, they are part of what keeps the operation running day to day and food and drink is the clearest example of this.In bus depots and industrial sites, drivers and engineers often start work before nearby shops open, and before any workplace catering is staffed. Breaks can also be short, and they are usually dictated by the timetable or the workload rather than by the clock. So, someone coming off a route at 5:40am with a 20-minute break doesn’t have the time or the option to go out and find something substantial to eat, which means they are limited to whatever is available on site.
Demand also changes depending on the shift times and an employee on the morning shift might reach for something different from an employee on the night shift. There is also a shift in demand between different sites within the same company as it all depends on the employee’s demographics. For provisions to be successful, they need to keep pace with the changing demands, which means reliable equipment and replenishment outside of office hours to ensure the machines don’t run out of stock.
There is a health aspect to consider as well, because the Health and Safety Executive recognises that shift work can affect health and safety and advises employers to assess and manage the risks that come with it.
The Society of Occupational Medicine also recommends that shift workers should have access to healthy, affordable food and drink throughout their shifts. That is not to say that a well-stocked staff area cures fatigue or delivers measurable health improvements on its own, but leaving people to work unsocial hours with no realistic access to food and drink is a choice and it is a poor one.
Replace assumptions with operational evidence
Vending machine operators, like Connect Vending, can use telemetry to analyse each individual site’s sales data to map out their usage and to highlight what time of day people rely on food and drink provisions the most. This sales data helps to inform restocking schedules and indicates when a machine may need servicing to prevent equipment downtime or from running out of stock.
An example of when this data has influenced the operational efficiency of a site comes from Connect Vending, who see this pattern regularly across the bus companies they work with. At one site, the consumption data showed a clear spike in sales at 1am as crews came off their final routes, which is hours after a traditional catering model would have closed and long before it would open again. If the provision had stopped at the end of the office day, that entire period of demand would have been missed, and those employees would have finished their shifts with nothing available to them.
Reviewing the data has also led to ranges and stocking schedules being changed at more than one site because what was being provided simply did not match when and how people were actually taking their breaks. None of this required a survey or a consultancy project, it just required looking at what the operation was already telling them.
A five-question audit for senior leaders
For any CEO or operations leader who wants a quick health check, five questions will highlight most of the gaps:
- Which of our benefits become unavailable outside standard office hours?
2. Which sites or shifts receive a different level of provision?
3. Are our services designed around actual break patterns?
4. What does our usage data reveal about unmet demand?
5. Have employees on every shift, at every site, been asked what they need?
CIPD advises employers to make sure benefits are genuinely valued by employees and aligned with wider business and workforce objectives and there is no way to know what a night shift values without asking the night shift.
Conclusion
None of this means that every site needs identical facilities or that a small depot should mirror a head office. Differences are fine when they are deliberate and the real question for leaders is whether differences in location and working hours are unintentionally creating a poorer experience for parts of the workforce, which is usually the parts doing the least visible and least flexible work.
Getting this right also sends a signal to your employees because it shows that the business understands how its people work rather than just how the org chart says they do. Employees notice when their working patterns have been considered, and they notice just as quickly when they have not.
