Who benefits from benefits?
| Date | 12 June 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-01-2017-0007 |
| Pages | 117-124 |
| Published date | 12 June 2017 |
| Author | John Gerard Fisher |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Employee behaviour |
Who benefits from benefits?
John Gerard Fisher
John Gerard Fisher is
Director at the
Department of Employee
Motivation, Fisher Moy
International, Aylesbury,
UK.
Abstract
Purpose –This paper aims to review the role of benefits within the employee engagement mix of
activities and products and provide three areas for strategic improvement.
Design/methodology/approach –The paper examines surveys and some well-known models for the
inclusion of benefits in employee remuneration and draws on any insights that study uncovers.
Findings –The findings are that employee benefits should be critically appraised on an annual basis,
not simply added to because they seem popular or are “in the news”.
Research limitations/implications –No specific research was undertaken, as this was a viewpoint of
current commercial practice.
Practical implications –Employers should recognize that spend-to-get benefits require participants
to spend their own money and therefore represent a cost to employees rather than a benefit. Employers
need to research benefits take-up and participant opinions if the value of introducing them is to be fully
realized. Communicating the features of benefits is usually poorly done by internal HR teams.
Social implications –Better scrutiny of the benefits basket and a closer eye on their effectiveness are
required.
Originality/value –This is a considered view taken from the experience of running a number of
commercial engagement programmes in the past 12 months with a view to helping practitioners avoid
costly mistakes in future.
Keywords Employee engagement, Benefits, Employer brand, Engagement, Rewards
Paper type Viewpoint
Cicero, the first-century BC Roman politician, lawyer and orator, was famous for
asking “Cui bono?” in criminal cases. Who benefits? If we can find the motivation,
then we can probably unmask the miscreant.
Modern business life is thankfully less liberty-challenging for most employees. But there are
still some big questions to be answered in organisational life. The provision of benefits is
one of them, especially as they can represent some 25 per cent or more of total employee
overheads in any given year.
Strategically speaking, benefits are part of an employee engagement strategy. The only
reason you would introduce benefits is to improve employee engagement, rather than to
fulfil some vague, wishy-washy feeling of being nice to staff. So let’s just step back a bit and
ask the question, who benefits from engagement?
It’s mainly the organisation, of course. In a 2009 report by management consultants
Towers Watson, 2010 Global Workforce Study covering 20,000 employees in 22
countries, it was concluded: “[. . .] high-engagement firms experienced an
earnings-per-share (EPS) growth of 28 per cent compared with an 11.2 per cent rate for
low-engagement firms”. One survey does not make this true, of course, so here are
some more analyses that seem to support the same idea.
In 2008, IBM analysed what managements said in their commentary to the financial reports
of 287 publicly quoted organisations in the USA against their actual end-year numbers. The
conclusion was: “Those organisations that were focused on measuring and addressing
DOI 10.1108/SHR-01-2017-0007 VOL. 16 NO. 3 2017, pp. 117-124, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1475-4398 STRATEGIC HR REVIEW PAGE 117
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