Are UK employees happy with their rewards and benefits?

HR professionals tend to overestimate employee satisfaction with rewards and benefits programmes, new research suggests.

In a survey of 500 employees and 103 HR professionals commissioned by Hawk Incentives, around half of employees (52%) said they were happy with the benefits offered by their company.

HR professionals thought their workers were markedly happier with their benefits, with three-quarters (77%) ranking them at seven or above on a ‘happiness scale’ from one to 10.

The research, for the report ‘Pulling the benefits lever: closing the gap between HR expectations and employee satisfaction’, also revealed the challenges faced by HR departments in ensuring that the benefits and incentives they offer are relevant and applicable to a diverse workforce.

Almost half of employees (44%) agreed with the statement that their company does not understand the real needs and wishes of its workforce, and 62% said their organisation’s rewards and incentives programmes are not applicable to them.

Thinking about the impact of specific benefits on recruitment, 69% of HR professionals said they believed that traditional benefits such as a private healthcare scheme would be a powerful pull factor, but only 47% of employees agreed that it would be a strong factor in their decision to work for a company.

A similar proportion of employees (52%) and HR leaders (57%) agreed that on-the-spot rewards like prepaid shopping cards can have a strong impact. This is in line with the finding that a clear majority (77%) of employees across all ages and levels of seniority said they wanted more benefits that help them cut the cost of their everyday life.

“What this research shows is that HR leaders are now actively deploying their rewards and incentives programme to help them achieve their business goals,” commented Heather Rogers, senior sales and marketing director at Hawk Incentives. “But simply offering a range of rewards is not enough — we know that the real results come from fine tuning your packages to reflect the current needs and wishes of your people, as they progress in their careers and personal lives.”