Microwaves are like what, $100? Couches? Another couple hundred? Whiteboards? Probably within the realm of $100 there again for a few of them. Food for one person? Stupidly cheap compared to a salary as well.
As long as getting these things could foreseeably have made only the one person who requested them even slightly happier, it seems worth it.
Standing desks are pretty expensive, I'll give you that. I have seen them used a fair bit though so having them might eventually pay off. Also staff might still feel better about having them even if they're not using them.
standing desks: People who want to stand will normally put 8 concrete blocks under their desk, then get a tall chair for when they don't wish to stand. This is cheap and effective.
microwave: Heh, we wore out many, and then got 4 restaurant-grade ones. We also have a couple toaster ovens. This is for a couple hundred people. For special occasions we also have a griddle, several 1-coil burners, and a propane grill.
couches: They get some use, mainly during meetings and when people play video games. Some people sometimes sleep in them.
whiteboards: The ones in weird places get used for polls, contests, etc.
croissants/yogurt/fresh fruit/whatever: This gets eaten. Bananas seem to get ripe late on Friday though, which doesn't end well, but at least they are cheap.
Everyone has standing desks and they are often used. Not all the time of course but most people use them occasionally.
Every company I've ever worked at has a microwave. Not having one would just be weird. Similarly every company I've worked at has whiteboards. They're cheap, why not have them?
My current company has fresh fruit and it all gets eaten. Just order less if it isn't getting eaten.
Anyway, I wasn't suggesting you immediately implement any suggestion an employee comes up with - you can survey your staff to see how many people agree. It's not difficult.
"You don't need metrics - just a suggestion box." Implied: managing the comforts for humans in an office is easy! (So easy that places like Facebook and Google have entire Experience Teams dedicated to it....)
In the real world it is always more complicated. There are always tradeoffs -- if you put in couches then maybe there's no room for quiet pods or a PlayStation or a lunch room or whatever. Always have on-going maintenance costs (who orders & pays for the fruit when the office admin is on holiday? Yet another thing to always remember and have to handover), and just the mind space required to deal with things. How do you know the office manager isn't picking the most expensive option every time? How do you know you're serving the vast majority who won't put something in the suggestion box? Etc.
Motivating someone to the near peak of their ability is generally the goal, but it's not easy... quite a bit harder than figuring out where to put the couch.
I'm a programmer at a manufacturing company and our offices all have (well we actually have two) canteens attached, Microwave, 4 rack toasters and a paninni maker.
Coffee/Tea/Water are available from a machine (you just put your token in and select what you want).
We don't have Sofa's but everything else we do have, I have a whiteboard behind my desk (though that is because what was a meeting room is now just my office).
Boss understands that staff comfort is important.
So no matter if your office has a personal sushi chef or just decent coffee, management's ability to empathize, see the pain, and compensate in some tangible way (not necessarily monetarily) can often be a huge motivator / confidence booster.
My boss insists I don't work over time (and if I need to do anything on a weekend I get the time back in lieu).
So while yeah they are basic perks I'll take no perks if I can have the above every day of the week.
For me as a programmer, 9-5 Mon to Friday every week, week in/week out is perfect - Work/Life balance is the best I've ever had since I moved to working as a programmer full time.
I was not the requester on any of these things, and in fact I was skeptical toward most of them at first, but each one was noticeably good, and over time has made me happier. These are precisely the sort of things I would look for the presence or absence of if I were to look for a job elsewhere.
How big is your company? How do you measure usage? Are you sure it's not just confirmation bias ("look at Alice using the microwave she insisted on having")? I would find it pretty surprising if you put out croissants and all but one person ignored them! If 90% of food is going uneaten... then maybe look for less perishable snacks and buy less at a time?
There are obviously sometimes conflicting requests, but imagine if you had staff whose main job was making sure employees enjoy their working environment and you just shifted stuff in and out of the office as requests changed. Almost every employee would have their pet want fulfilled and you could be experimenting with new stuff every day.
Sounds really expensive, but imagine what something like that might to do turnover if done well
EDIT: it sounds like you did try a lot of stuff, didn't mean to imply you didn't. I just wonder what the logical endpoint of this idea is and whether it is workable
Also, anecdotally, adding those things didn't affect my turnover at all. What did affect my turnover? Having (or not having) interesting projects for people to work on.
In my office here's a list of "staff ideas" and how they turned out:
- "Let's have standing desks!" After the first six months, not a single person in the office has changed the height of their desk in over a year.
- "Let's get a microwave, so people will start bringing their lunch from home." The microwave gets used once a week (by the person who requested) and now it is one more thing that needs to be cleaned weekly.
- "Let's have couches, so people can work from places other than their desk!" The person who requested this used the couch every day. After he left the company, no one else has ever used it.
- "Let's buy more whiteboards and put them up in various places so it is easy to have discussions anywhere!" Of the 6 whiteboards, 5 of them have had the same writing on them for over six months. One whiteboard has had the same project diagram for over a year. The ink is so set I couldn't even erase it last time I tried. Only one whiteboard ever gets used -- the one we had before the suggestion.
- "Let's get croissants/yogurt/fresh fruit/whatever". In 90% of cases, the person who requested it is the only person who ever eats it. After a few months I have to discontinue ordering it because we are throwing away 90% of it.