Employee Lifestyle

A free Deliveroo voucher won't fix a terrible manager

Welcome to Employee Lifestyle

Updated September 2026

For years, businesses have talked about staff satisfaction, employee engagement, employee experience — what it's like to join a business, work there, develop and eventually leave.

We think there's something else:

How does working here fit into someone's life?

Because people don't stop being people when they log on. They have families, friends, interests, responsibilities, ambitions and lives that have absolutely nothing to do with work.

And increasingly, a great job isn't just about salary, status or promotion. It's about where you work, when you work, how much autonomy you have and whether you've still got something left when you log off.

We call that Employee Lifestyle.

This isn't about working less. It's about working better.

Employee Lifestyle isn't about letting everyone work whenever and wherever they feel like it. No, no. no. Businesses still need to perform. Customers still need looking after. teams need to collaborate. And deadlines remain annoyingly committed to being deadlines.

​It's about understanding what the business genuinely needs — and then asking where people can have more choice, flexibility and autonomy around that.​

The more autonomy people have, the clearer we need to be about expectations, accountability and what good performance looks like.

That's why Employee Lifestyle isn't separate from performance. Done properly, they support each other.

So, what about Employee Engagement?

We’ve measured it. Surveyed it. Benchmarked it. Put action plans around it. Created engagement committees. Introduced wellbeing initiatives, recognition schemes, away days, free breakfasts, Friday drinks and, occasionally, things involving beanbags.

And yet we may have been asking the wrong questions all along.

Because employees don't experience their employer as a collection of engagement initiatives. They experience what it actually feels like to work there.

·      How they're managed.

·      How much autonomy they have.

·      Whether they can get their work done without fighting unnecessary processes.

·      Whether they're trusted.

·      Whether they can develop.

·      Whether they're paid fairly.

·      Whether somebody notices when they're doing a great job.

And increasingly, whether their job fits reasonably well alongside the rest of their life.

That's Employee Lifestyle.

And we think it's becoming far more important than traditional employee engagement.

There is a business reason for all of this

Let's get something out of the way first.

Creating a good employee experience isn't simply about being nice. There is a very obvious commercial argument for it.

Engaged employees tend to be more productive, more likely to stay and more likely to deliver better outcomes for customers (you can see some references at the bottom).

Replacing good people is expensive. Poor management, unnecessary absence, and low productivity are all expensive. And recruiting when the perfectly good employee you already had decides they've had enough is particularly expensive.

So, when we talk about creating a better Employee Lifestyle, this isn't just the usual HR vanity project. It's about creating an environment where people are able — and want — to do their best work.

That tends to be rather good for business.

Did somebody say ‘Pandemic’?

Whatever your view on remote working, COVID changed the relationship many people have with work. Millions of people suddenly discovered that some of the rules we'd treated as set-in-stone weren't actually so set-in-stone after all.

You didn't necessarily need to commute for two hours to sit at a desk and email somebody sitting three desks away. Some meetings could have been Slack chats. Some jobs could be done perfectly well from somewhere else. People could even be trusted to manage their own time.

And perhaps most importantly, work suddenly became much more visibly intertwined with life.

Children appeared on Teams calls. Dogs barked during presentations. Deliveries arrived halfway through meetings. People saw inside each other's kitchens.

The carefully maintained wall between professional life and real life became considerably less convincing.

And once people had experienced that, new expectations came into play.

The deal changed

For previous generations, there was often an implicit bargain:

You give the company your time. The company gives you money. If you're ambitious, you give it rather more of your time and eventually the company might give you rather more money.

That's an enormous simplification, obviously. But it isn't completely unrecognisable.

Today, people increasingly expect something more nuanced.

They still expect to work hard.

They still expect accountability.

They still expect to deliver.

But they may also expect some control over how work fits into their life.

That doesn't mean everyone wants to work from home. It doesn't mean that nobody wants an office. And it certainly doesn't mean employees should simply be able to do whatever they want. Perhaps though, Shakira had a point with Wherever, Whenever. Sometimes at least.

It does mean that flexibility, autonomy, trust and individual circumstances have become part of the employment proposition.

Businesses that pretend otherwise may increasingly find themselves competing for talent with businesses that don't.

Employee Lifestyle isn't about perks

This is important.

A free Deliveroo voucher won't fix a terrible manager. Neither will yoga. Nor fruit. Nor an app that reminds employees to breathe while they're receiving emails at 10.30pm.

Perks can be lovely. But they're decoration.

Employee Lifestyle starts with how work actually works.

·      Do people have sensible workloads?

·      Do they understand what's expected of them?

·      Are managers capable of managing?

·      Can people challenge something without committing a career-limiting act?

·      Are decisions reasonably fair and consistent?

·      Can somebody occasionally attend their child's school assembly without behaving as though they're requesting compassionate leave?

·      Can people progress?

·      Are good performers recognised?

·      Are poor performers actually managed?

·      Can somebody make a mistake without immediately looking for somewhere to hide?

Get those things right first. Then by all means order the pizza.

Flexibility is bigger than working from home

One of the mistakes businesses make is treating flexibility as a binary argument about office attendance. Three days versus two, Tuesday to Thursday - we all know the acronym, mandatory anchor days. Everyone discussing desk occupancy as though civilisation depends upon it.

But flexibility can mean much more than location.

It can mean start and finish times, compressed hours, different working patterns. It can mean time away for family responsibilities, the ability to work intensely during one period and rebalance later or simply different arrangements at different stages of someone's life.

Not every role can offer the same flexibility. A software developer and a customer-facing employee may have very different constraints.

That's okay.

Fair doesn't always mean identical.

The question is whether restrictions exist because they're genuinely necessary for the work — or simply because that's how we've always done it.

Good managers matter more than almost anything else

You can design the world's most progressive People policies and still create a miserable place to work if your managers are terrible.

Because employees rarely experience “the company”. They experience their manager.

A good manager can make a difficult period manageable. A bad manager can make an excellent organisation unbearable.

Which means developing managers shouldn't be an occasional training course delivered when somebody finally complains.

Managers need to understand how to set expectations, give feedback, manage performance, have difficult conversations, support people, recognise good work and — occasionally — simply behave like reasonable human beings.

None of that is particularly fashionable. It's just enormously important.

Careers don't have to look like ladders anymore

Employee expectations around careers are changing too.

Not everybody wants their manager's job. Some people want deeper expertise, some want broader experience. Some want to lead people and some absolutely don't. Some will be intensely ambitious for five years and then decide other parts of life matter more for a while. And then become ambitious again.

A modern People strategy needs to accommodate careers that move sideways, forwards, occasionally backwards and sometimes pause altogether.

The organisation still needs capability. Employees still need to perform. But there's no particular reason everyone's career needs to follow the same template.

Different people need different things

This is where Employee Lifestyle gets interesting.

• A graduate starting their career may value office time, social connection and rapid development.

• A parent with young children may value flexibility.

• Someone caring for an elderly relative may need predictability.

• Someone approaching retirement may want to reduce their hours while passing on decades of knowledge.

• ·      Someone else may simply love coming into the office five days a week.

None of them is wrong.

The challenge for employers is moving away from designing work around an imaginary average employee who doesn't actually exist. Everybody is different. There’s a reason why offices have adjustable chairs…..They can be adapted to people as individuals, keep them safe and keep them productive.

Makes sense right?

Of course, none of that means creating 200 bespoke employment contracts.

It simply means building enough flexibility into the organisation so that different people can thrive without the business descending into chaos.

Measure what matters

If Employee Lifestyle is going to be more than a nice phrase, it needs measurement.

But that doesn't necessarily mean another 88-question engagement survey.

·      Look at what people actually do.

·      Are your best people leaving?

·      Where?

·      Who are their managers?

·      Are absence levels increasing?

·      Are some teams consistently outperforming others?

·      Are internal promotions happening?

·      Who applies for them?

·      Do employees use the flexibility you've supposedly given them?

·      Are managers dealing with performance issues?

·      What does recruitment feedback tell you?

·      What do exit interviews repeatedly say?

People data becomes much more useful when you stop admiring dashboards and start asking:

“What is this telling us to do differently?”

Digital People HR says…

The best organisations won't necessarily be the ones offering the most perks. They'll be the ones that understand that employment is a relationship.

Businesses need people to perform. People need work to provide something worthwhile in return. Money is obviously a part of that. But so are development, autonomy, flexibility, good management, recognition, purpose and the ability to have a life outside work.

Employee Lifestyle isn't about making work easy. It's about making work work better.

For employees. And for the business.

Because when people have clarity, good management, sensible flexibility and the opportunity to do work they're proud of, engagement tends to follow.

Perhaps we don't need quite so many initiatives after all.

Great work should be part of a great life.

Not a replacement for one.

Want to rethink how work works?

Digital People HR helps growing businesses create People strategies, policies and ways of working that make sense for the business and the humans who work in it.

Practical. Commercial. Human.

And pretty allergic to unnecessary HR theatre.

Get in touch. Let's talk.

Want some source with that?

Gallup's latest major meta-analysis looked at more than 3.3 million employees across 183,000 business units, 53 industries and 90 countries.

When it compared the most engaged teams with the least engaged, the median differences included:

23% higher profitability

18% higher sales productivity

14% higher productivity using other measures

78% lower absenteeism

21% lower turnover in high-turnover organisations — and 51% lower in lower-turnover organisations

Highly engaged teams also performed better on customer loyalty, quality and safety.

That's a fairly persuasive argument for caring about what it's actually like to work for you.

And it's not just Gallup. Research from Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre covering nearly 1.9 million employees found workplace wellbeing positively associated with productivity, customer loyalty and profitability, and negatively associated with staff turnover.

The CIPD reaches a similar conclusion: people with good-quality jobs who are managed well are more likely to contribute to productivity, better products and services, and innovation.