Now, there's an important distinction between bonuses and perks.

Bonuses are compensation that is added to whatever the set hourly wage or salary is. The most common form of a bonus is cash, but it can also be non-monetary means—as long as it provides value to employees and the company.

Perks, while also creating value on top of the set wage or salary, are often smaller in nature and more often non monetary. It’s essentially anything that the company provides to be enjoyed or be used in a limited context. Sorry, you can’t take that Xbox home.

Bonuses come in many shapes and sizes. These can be financial boosts to your salary based on set milestone achievements or as an annual gift from the company for sticking with it through thick and thin.

Some specific examples of these are sign-on and referral bonuses for recruiting people, annual or milestone bonuses for achieving certain personal or company goals, extra vacation days, and opportunities to invest a part of your generated value as an employee into company stocks and shares.

Perks, on the other hand, have the same ultimate goal as a means of incentivizing employees, yet often come in smaller packages that don’t necessarily have a monetary benefit attached to it. They can, but tend not to.

These can range from free snacks to birthday gifts to monthly lunches, learning and development budgets, company partner discounts, and—something many of us consider a standard in any industry—coffee.

Benefits and rewards platform Perkbox outlines some of the best and most universal perks for companies to offer and points out several key aspects to focus on when creating a perks package.

Namely, [1] perks work best if they are appropriate to the employee base (while snacks are universal, cinema tickets or free alcohol might only target specific audiences), and [2] coordinate with your employees to know what benefits they’d value the most.

It helps to offer a benefits package where anyone can find something they can benefit from, but talking to them beforehand will do wonders.

Now, what not to do when it comes to perks is essentially everything you see here in this listicle.

But, to be more precise, no pet rocks, “Monopoly” money, extra breaks, bags of air, appreciation trophies, scratch-off tickets where you win nothing, rubber toys, the thinnest slice of pizza in the world (probably cut by the cheapest pizza cutter in the world), a piece of candy, thank you cards or letters, unrealistically deflated bonus systems, used LEGOs, a first aid kit with a children’s activity book, and water. The list goes on, but we’ll end on a positive note.

Companies can try to wrap a perk in joyful wrapping paper and sell it as a gift, but it won’t change how employees will react to it. And there’s actually a list of things to avoid.

First and foremost, benefits can’t be generic. Nearly every company nowadays has kitchens with snacks, Xboxes and PlayStations, lounges, foosball tables and, again, coffee.

It goes double for benefits that are irrelevant. Benefits are supposed to solve a problem an employee has and can hence use them to their full extent. Like getting a discount for a beauty salon when you’re bald.

And it goes triple for everything else the company might be up to with benefits: trying to cover up a bad corporate culture, discouraging folks from actually using the benefits, and deliberately hiding benefits, but creating positive employee branding saying there are perks.

Now, nothing is free and everything has strings attached in the corporate world. Benefits are no exception. But instead of creating this facade of a good-guy company at minimum cost, a benefit should be viewed as a financial contribution to boost motivation, increase workplace appeal, and encourage innovation, among other things. And that, alas, will cost money, time, and energy. But it costs more to cheap out now and “replace” it later.

Today’s employees won’t be satisfied with a lackluster assortment of “gifts”. Benefits have to be well-rounded, covering areas of employee health, well-being, financial security as well as work-life balance. Staying competitive in the industry means actually investing into the right kinds of benefits that fit an employee base. And so if you have happy employees, you have a happy company.

It doesn’t have to stop here because Bored Panda is chock-full of stories regarding employers being cheapskates.

But if that’s not your forte, maybe the upvote button is? Or maybe share your thoughts and stories in the comment section below?