Most UK organisations offer their employees a wide variety of benefits as part of their remuneration packages. Commonly offered benefits include insurance plans, for example, health, dental, life insurances, wellness and flexible working programmes, annual leave and pension schemes. Traditionally, the key role of benefits has been to improve retention by providing employees with an enhanced level of safety, security and wellbeing in the workplace. This retention role is supported by academic research, such as Compensation, by Barry Gerhart and Jerry Newman and George Milkovich, published by McGraw Hill in April 2019, and practice-based studies as demonstrated by the Employee Benefits: A survey from the UK workplace survey, published by Aviva in May 2019, which finds that 44% of the employees surveyed say they remain in their current jobs due to a particular benefit: their ‘work-life balance’.
In the last few years, however, some organisations have begun to adopt new benefit schemes with more ambitious objectives that go beyond employee retention. Many are experimenting with socially desirable benefits such as community volunteer time off, public transport subsidies, car-sharing schemes or discounts for home energy efficient technologies. These benefits are considered to be in line with corporate social responsibility agendas. They are valued by employees, appreciated by communities and good for the environment. Their role is more far-reaching as it is believed they can improve organisational results by attracting community and environmentally-conscious employees and customers, motivating well-regarded behaviours and promoting a healthier and sustainable organisational culture. These new schemes offer a practical and effective way to address big societal problems that are known to require local solutions. They benefit not only current workforces but also future ones.
Dr Monica Franco-Santos is a reader at Cranfield School of Management
