Hiring for Happiness

Being forced to do something which isn't a major benefit to the company would be close to a deal breaker (e.g. filing TPS reports), regardless of salary, unless you had other options. Whereas doing something unpleasant which is clearly important (coming in on christmas morning to fix a security problem) is painful, but much more acceptable.

Really, what seems to work the best is to offer "sensible defaults" for most things, and then let employees make their own choices if they wish. Stuff like offering a budget to buy your own desktop/laptop/phone, but "a lot of people like the 15" MBP HD, and we have a couple already configured if you'd like that". Having social events on the weekends, after work, etc. where employees are invited, but certainly not mandatory. (for this, informal usually works better, especially if some people are clueful enough to try to build links across departments, like the engineers also inviting people from sales).