The service–people pairing (corporate welfare)
In recent years, something has cracked in the relationship between HR and people.
On paper, companies offer more benefits than ever: digital meal vouchers, health insurance, welfare platforms, agreements, and standardized services. Yet discomfort and dissatisfaction continue to grow.
- Only 13% of Italian workers say they feel fully engaged in their job.
- 77% of companies believe they provide effective welfare, but only 54% of employees agree. In fact, 35% consider it completely useless.
This is what many call the Great Gap of corporate welfare. The problem is not the quantity of services, but the distance between those services and people’s real needs.
Modern HR, often under pressure to optimize processes and reduce costs, risks turning into an administrative management center rather than a true guardian of employee well-being.
Why more and more companies are moving to “on-demand” models
For decades, the workplace was a symbol of stability. Headquarters. Long-term leases. Assigned desks. Workstations often left empty but paid for anyway.
Then something changed.
Post-pandemic hybrid work has challenged a long-standing assumption: do you really need a fixed space to work effectively? Companies are increasingly asking themselves: why should we own a space when we can activate it only when we need it?
This is where the “workspace as a service” model was born. Workspace as a service. On demand.
Businesses want scalable flexibility. They need to adapt to seasonal peaks, remote teams, distributed collaborators, and temporary projects. In this context, signing multi-year contracts becomes a constraint rather than a guarantee.
Where true corporate welfare begins
When corporate welfare is truly designed around people, the numbers change.
- Productivity can increase by +21%.
- Retention can reach up to 88%.
- ROI can multiply the initial investment by 3 to 5 times.
The point is not to offer more benefits, but to integrate tools with a work experience that truly improves quality of life. Companies that are evolving are rethinking the work experience.
For example, by leveraging the effectiveness of coworking.
People who work in flexible environments report +35% higher motivation and +20% greater satisfaction compared to traditional offices. Compared to home office, productivity can increase by up to +22%. Moreover, considering that in Italy 1 in 5 workers is at risk of burnout, offering professional alternatives to isolated remote work becomes a strategic responsibility.
From theory to practice: how to integrate services and people
Real change happens when corporate welfare becomes operational.
Offering flexible workspaces means reducing commuting stress, limiting the isolation of remote work, and creating real opportunities for interaction without forcing daily office attendance.
With NOTONLYDESK
NOTONLYDESK allows HR teams to centralize the management of coworking spaces across Italy in a single dashboard, using Nodey (digital tokens) to book workstations, meeting rooms, or private offices. No multiple invoices. No manual operations. Just measurable flexibility.
For HR this means:
– offering a solution for hybrid work
– monitoring usage and impact
– improving KPIs such as engagement and retention
– demonstrating a real ROI on well-being
If you want to transform welfare from a list of services into a strategic lever for well-being, discover how NOD works and activate a test for your team.
👉 Discover NOD for your corporate welfare plan.
