As an employer's viewpoint, paid vacation was intended for three reasons.
First, as additional compensation for the work you put it.
Second, as an important employee "health and wellness benefit.
Third, to my company to cross train. Someday, you might come to work and resign because you found a better job. You could be in an accident. You could retire. Or worst of all you could die. Everyone needs to be replaceable. By taking time off, companies are forced to figure out how to operate without you.
I understand that many employees view vacation as you do.
As for the gym memberships, we actually knew where our employees lived, and we knew how they got to and from work. So, your comment about the commute challenges, only applied to one employee in this case. Those who took the "bus" to work, largely live in the poor minority areas of town, that were far closer than the "burbs" (this group drove, and we provided parking). We located the company on the bus route and no employee commuted by mass transit more than 20 minutes a day (not unusual in most smaller cities, where companies locate in the downtown area the largest reach when it comes to attracting workers.
There are people that live in major cities like NYC, SF, CHI, LA, ATL, DC and others that do commute longer distances, but that was not the case at the companies I am referring to.
As for physically tired, the opposite is true. Operating within the health insurance/health care deliver space, most of our employees sat all day. As the saying goes, sitting is the new smoking. In fact, exercise has been proven to make this group of employees less tired. When you are a "health care" company, you actually do study how to keep people healthy. Exercise is one of them, the one most people neglect.
A more truthful answer for the majority of our employees that did not use the gym membership was that they wanted to get home to their families. Fair. We did arrange for the local health club to offer a special "lunch" class of low intensity exercise for those that wanted to use the membership but wanted to get home to their families after work. We also flexed work hours to start anytime an employee wanted to start between 7-9 AM until 5:30 PM, so we were paying them 8 hours for working 6 and half. Still less than half the employees participated.
Employees that did use the lunch gym class, skipped lunch. Instead, they ate half their lunch around 10 AM and half around 2 PM, others drank their lunch at their desk with one of the liquid meal supplements or "dieted".
We gave employees, one hour for lunch and 15-minute breaks away from their desks (don't blame me for the detailed structure, it was a union request, I would rather see employees simply take those 30-minute breaks as needed and really cared less whether they when they took "a break" as long as they go a day's work done during the day.
Customers drive work for many jobs. So, if you answer the phone or see patients, the phone ringing or schedule drives the work. If you sit at a desk and interact with the screen, must jobs had metrics attached to them.
We were very cognizant of burning employees out. Which is why we tried to avoid overtime.
Interestingly, your last comment is also untrue. We saw no difference between our employees that were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (doctors or executives) and those that were paid far less.
Nor is it logical to argue that a doctor earning $400K needs a better bed, heating, or other necessities... but many do need to exercise, and many don't.
But you missed the point, the purpose of the gym funding was precisely because as a health care organization, we understood that exercise is critical for maximizing a person's productivity. You are right in one sense, while we offered employees competitive compensation, if we gave employees slightly more by converting the health benefit into cash, they may well have spent it on their families. But our selfish goal was to keep the employee healthier for our benefit, the fact that the employee also benefited made it a win-win situation.
Large employers think along two distinct lines when it comes to employees. The compensation has to be competitive. Employees even those bad at math can compare two numbers and tell which one is higher. A bit more complex is for them to factor in the value of fringe benefits, most companies help them converting them into an average dollar value, but in the end, employees determine for themselves who good their compensation is when they compare it with another opportunity. Employers that fail the competitive compensation test, see their turnover skyrocket. Turnover can be very expensive if a job has a learning curve to it.
The second line of thought is how to keep employees healthy. Companies spend money to maintain their employees' health in a manner not unlike they spend money to keep equipment in good working order.
With machines, it is pretty easy, you simply make sure people don't abuse machines and you service them regularly. You make sure people are trained on how to use them properly.
People are far more complex than machines. While the concept of keeping people healthy is obvious. so much is outside the employer's control. Having employees that engage in dangerous activities away from work is something that employer cannot affect, but something an employer can be impacted by. An employee going through a divorce, death, or depression unrelated to the job, does impact the employer and employers often offer mental health counseling to address those issues. An employee abusing substances, when they are ready to stop, can find support through substance abuse programs paid for by employers. Every employer is different, their resources are different. Those resources impact how much an employer can spend to keep their employees healthy. Even when it is "cheaper" to "throw out the old and bring in the new" most employers show a degree of loyalty to the employees that got them to where they are. At many of the health care companies, I ran we provided our employees our services for free even when the cheaper option would have been to wish them well and move on.
I sense you have never been in a position of senior leadership at a company. Since your comments clearly come from the position of an employee looking in. I get it. I was that person for a decade, before I began to ascend the corporate ladder high enough to see the thought that goes on regarding employees.
To be clear, there are some employers that don't seem to care for one reason or another. In many cases, they can't afford to. A great example are the many small coffee shops, I frequent in my town. Turnover is high, management is often absent, and pay is low.
The job learning curve is often a few hours and the career potential almost zilch. So, employees work there till they find better jobs. A few staff love the work and stay longer, but long term often means up to two years, whereas at the companies I ran, long term was over 30 years.
But companies that seek long term employees with special and specific skills and training and that generate reasonable profits, don't want turnover. And those companies do work hard to be not only competitive, but to keep those talented and skilled workers healthy, even when the worker does care.
A real tragedy is too few people learn about health in school, don't practice it until their health starts to decline and then are trying to play catch-up from a lifetime of abusing their bodies. Employers have "corporate memories" and so while they can only do so much like offer gym memberships, they cannot compel employees to use them. They can offer to pay for smoking cessation but can't force employee to engage in it. Nor should they. We are a free society and people have the right to choose to hurt themselves, but good employers with the resources to do so, tend to care more about an employees' health than they do... because... wait for it... capitalism. Good employers want to maximize profits and they do that when employees are healthy and not sick.
