Notes from the SmartHR COMBENBEN seminar in Riga
Beneflo joined the SmartHR COMBENBEN seminar in Riga, where HR and reward professionals spent the day on one question: are benefits budgets going where employees actually value them?
The short answer from the data presented on stage: mostly yes, but with one consistent blind spot.
Among companies that offer benefits, everyone offers the same seven things
One caveat before the numbers: this data covers organisations that already run a benefits programme. Plenty of employers in Latvia offer nothing beyond salary, and they are not in this sample. Within the group that does provide benefits, the shares look like this:
| Benefit | % of organisations offering benefits |
|---|---|
| Health insurance | 99% |
| Social and sports events (team sports, Christmas party, etc.) | 95% |
| Option to work remotely | 92% |
| Mobile phone (work and personal use) | 85% |
| Paid or reimbursed parking | 84% |
| Gifts (Christmas, birthdays, etc.) | 82% |
| Life-event allowances (marriage, childbirth, etc.) | 80% |
For scale, one company presented its own figure from the stage: EUR 1,711 per employee. That is a single organisation’s number rather than a market average, but it gives a sense of the budget sitting behind a list like this.
Read the table again and the problem becomes obvious. Nothing here differentiates one employer from another. Once a company decides to offer benefits at all, it almost inevitably offers this exact list – so a candidate comparing two such offers sees the same page twice. The budget is being spent, but past the decision to spend it, it is not doing any competitive work.
What employees rank highest
A second session presented employee-side data — a ranking that held up across both Latvia and the wider Baltic market:
- Health insurance
- Flexible working hours
- Extra vacation days
- Remote or hybrid work
- Meal benefits – rated higher in Latvia than the Baltic average
- Wellness benefits
- Team events
(Employee average importance rating, 1–7 scale. Wolt & Norstat study, 2025, n=1,500, Baltics.)
The two lists overlap at the top: health insurance, flexibility, remote work. Employers have those right.
The interesting number was in the footnote. Meal benefits sit at number five when employees rank benefits against each other – but 87% say meal benefits increase their job satisfaction when asked about them directly. That gap between ranked preference and stated impact is where most reward strategies leak value. People do not put food at the top of a list. They notice it every single day.
Want vs. reality
The clearest slide of the day was also the simplest:
- 57% of employees still receive no regular meal benefit. More than half.
- 53% would choose food delivery if the decision were theirs.
- 90% of Latvian employees say freedom of choice matters — 38% call it very important, 52% fairly important.
That last figure is the one worth sitting with. Nine out of ten employees care less about which specific benefit they receive than about being the one who picks it. A fixed benefit package, however generous, is answering a question employees are not asking.
What is changing in day-to-day office life
The final section covered ordering behaviour from 2025–2026 – small operational signals that add up:
- From spontaneous to planned. Companies now place orders up to three days in advance instead of the same morning.
- Food as a reason to come in. Under hybrid arrangements, catering has become a practical argument for choosing the office over home.
- Team events and large orders are growing, driven by wanting variety in one place rather than five separate suppliers.
- Office snacking has changed. Sweets are still there, but so are energy bars, protein drinks and protein desserts.
- Coffee has gone specialty. Named local roasters – Kalve Kafija, Rocket Bean, Andrito – rather than generic office supply.
- Pet-friendly offices are buying for pets, including dog ice cream in summer.
None of these are strategy items. They are the texture of what employees experience, and they are exactly the things a rigid annual benefits plan cannot respond to.
The takeaway for reward teams
Three things came out of the day consistently:
The universal benefits are table stakes, not advantages. Health insurance is near-universal among employers who offer anything at all – something you cannot afford to drop and cannot win with. Budget beyond that point is where the differentiation happens.
Meal benefits are the most under-served high-impact category in Latvia. Employees rate them above the Baltic average, 87% say they raise job satisfaction, and 57% still do not get them. That is an unusually clear gap.
Choice is the benefit. With 90% of employees saying freedom of choice matters, the structure of the package now carries as much weight as its contents. Giving people a budget and letting them allocate it removes the guesswork that fixed packages depend on.
That last point is the reason Beneflo exists. Instead of committing budget to a fixed list and hoping it lands, employers set the amount and the policy, and employees choose what they spend it on — health, transport, meals, wellness, learning – across 27 EU countries, with everything tracked in one place.
Thanks to SmartHR for organising the seminar and to everyone who came by to talk afterwards.
Want to see how a flexible benefits budget would work for your team? Book a demo.