Work-from-home is a permanent fixture of UK working life now. Around 28% of UK workers do at least some remote work each week, and a steady majority of knowledge workers in London, Manchester and Edinburgh work hybrid or fully remote. Yet most company perks programmes are still designed for an office-centric workforce — gym memberships near the office, free fruit in the kitchen, lunchtime yoga in the meeting room. This guide covers the perks that actually work for distributed UK teams: what is worth investing in, what is theatre, and how to tailor a perks scheme to genuinely support remote and hybrid workers.
Effective remote-worker perks fall into four categories:
Each pillar matters. Skip any of them and you have a programme that quietly leaves remote workers feeling they get less than office colleagues.
The single highest-ROI WFH perk. £200–£400 one-off for a sit-stand desk, ergonomic chair, monitor, riser, keyboard and mouse. Fully expensable, no questions asked beyond a receipt. The cost is real but pays for itself in avoided long-term back-pain absence within 18 months — see the analysis in our wellbeing perks guide.
Logitech, Dell and Steelcase have employee-purchase schemes that stretch the budget further. See current tech offers.
For remote workers, the laptop is the office. A 4-year-old MacBook with degraded battery is a productivity tax invisible to a manager who never sees it. A 3-year refresh cycle, with the option to keep the old machine for personal use, is well-received and keeps the workforce productive.
£20–£35 per month towards home broadband for full-time remote workers. Real money, real perceived value, and the case for treating it as a genuine business expense is strong. Sky Broadband and Virgin Media run partner schemes that make this even more cost-effective. Current broadband offers.
Less common but increasingly meaningful. £10–£15 per month towards home heating/electricity for full-time remote workers, particularly during winter. Combined with HMRC's £6/week working-from-home tax allowance, this materially offsets the higher home-running cost.
Where a company expects out-of-hours availability, a £20–£40/month phone allowance — or a fully-paid business mobile contract — is fair. Business contracts (negotiated through brokers like Compare The Networks) typically beat retail SIM-only plans by 20–35% — see our business mobile guide.
For remote workers who occasionally need a change of scenery, 2–4 co-working day passes per month at £15–£25 each is generous. WeWork On Demand, Spaces, Patch and many independent co-working chains have UK-wide schemes that work with this model. £30–£100/employee/month, used genuinely twice a month, is excellent value.
For remote workers nowhere near a chain gym, the on-demand fitness app outperforms a chain-gym corporate scheme. Peloton App (no bike required) costs ~£10/month and gives access to thousands of strength, yoga, running, meditation and stretching classes. Apple Fitness+ at ~£10/month integrates with Apple Watch and is similarly broad. Current Peloton offer.
For remote workers, lunch from home is free; lunch out is occasional. A Deliveroo Plus subscription (free delivery on orders over £15) saves £40–£100/year for an employee who orders even modestly often. The cost to the employer is negligible if structured as a subsidised individual sub. Current Deliveroo offer.
Particularly important for remote workers. Isolation is a real driver of mental-health risk in distributed teams. A 24/7 EAP (Spectrum.Life, Health Assured) at ~£30/employee/year is high-leverage. Current EAP partners.
Two or three in-person team gatherings a year, fully paid. £400–£800 per employee per year is a credible budget. The cost is real but the alternative — a team that has never met in person — has measurable culture, retention and productivity costs.
For office-bound "company moments" — birthdays, milestones, all-hands — sending a small home-delivered package (drinks, food, a book) makes remote workers feel included rather than overlooked. £15–£25 per occasion, a few times a year.
Treat the office's cultural moments — Friday-afternoon drinks, summer barbecues — as fungible. "Spend £10–£15 on yourself, take a photo, share it in #social". Modest but inclusive.
| Perk | Annual cost / employee | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Ergonomic equipment | £100 (amortised) | One-off |
| Broadband stipend | £300 | Recurring |
| Mobile contract | £240 | Recurring |
| Co-working passes | £500 | Recurring |
| Peloton App / Apple Fitness+ | £120 | Recurring |
| Deliveroo Plus | £70 | Recurring |
| EAP | £30 | Recurring |
| In-person event budget | £600 | Recurring |
| Total | £1,960 |
Roughly £160/month per remote employee. Well within the cost range of an office desk in a UK city centre, and arguably better-value compared to per-desk office rents in central London or Manchester.
Some perks designed for office life translate poorly to remote — and continuing them creates a gap remote workers notice:
Audit your existing perks programme. Anything that requires being physically near the office should either be available remote-equivalent or removed for fairness reasons.
Companies running "3 days in office, 2 days remote" hybrid policies often mistakenly believe they need only office-centric perks. They do not. Even hybrid workers are remote-enough on home days that the broadband stipend and ergonomic budget are valuable. Hybrid policies should treat remote days as first-class.
Remote and hybrid workers deserve a perks programme designed around how they actually work. The four pillars — setup, expense subsidies, at-home wellbeing, connection — cover the bases. Total spend of around £1,500–£2,000 per remote employee per year delivers genuine value and is competitive with the implicit benefit of an office desk. Browse current WFH-friendly perks.
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