We have now been posting on Employee Benefit themes for almost six years on this blog. With such a wealth of data and thoughts behind us it is perhaps inevitable that some topics are important enough to recur time and time again. Two such items are motivation (and productivity) of UK employees, and the rapidly ageing workforce. Some useful reading on both of these issues has just crossed our radar, and we thought we would share the links below with our followers who want to read more on these key subjects.
The first document is from Group Income Protection insurer UNUM. Its How to motivate staff: the ultimate guide for employers is full of good content and statistics about employee motivation, how to achieve this, and indeed the key mistakes to avoid when doing so. This sits nicely alongside recent comments around Brexit and the UK’s productivity deficit, and we would recommend UNUM’s report as a useful source of data for HR and Finance departments considering this issue further.
The other link arrived over the weekend from no less a body than the Office for National Statistics (ONS). To mark the International Day of the Older Person, the ONS released 5 facts about older people at work, which – despite our regularly covering this topic here and at our seminars – may still come as rather a surprise to many of our audience. The headline message is that in the last 10 years the number of over 65s in the UK workplace has increased dramatically, from 609,000 in 2006 to 1.19 million in 2016. This sharp rise is no doubt partially driven by the abolition of the Default Retirement Age, and introduction of Pension Freedoms, as covered in our retirement conversations post).
