Engagement and benefits – making the link

New research from Accor Services highlights the huge opportunity for employers to use rewards and benefits more creatively to improve engagement.

Employee engagement is rising up the agenda as global competition increases and the knowledge-driven economy intensifies the battle to find and keep top talent.

To offer organisations insight into what drives engagement and to clarify the role of reward and benefits in achieving it, Accor Services recently completed research with 1200 employees and over 430 employers.

The findings have helped to highlight just how engaged the UK workforce is – and whether the perception of employers corresponds with the reality presented by employees.

Engaging results and benefits

Reward and benefits can only help build employee engagement in the context of a broader engagement strategy that takes into account a range of factors. These might include, for example, the physical working environment, career and development opportunities, internal two way communications and the quality of leadership and management.

Nonetheless, one in four employers in the Accor Services’ study rated reward and benefits as a key driver in engaging their people, putting it firmly in the engagement mix. By contrast, only 20% of employees surveyed reported they understood the value of benefits offered by their organisation.

When this lack of understanding is compared with employees’ satisfaction with benefits – only 25% think their benefits are competitive when compared to others doing a similar job in a similar organisation, for example – the pivotal role of rewards and benefits in driving engagement becomes clearer.

Clarifying employees’ preferences

Understanding employee needs in the context of reward and benefits is a key step in developing engagement. According to Accor Services’ research, the two main constraints that employees perceive in their daily lives are lack of time (reported by 28% of employee respondents) and lack of money (reported by 44% of employee respondents).

Few employers can automatically raise wages or reduce hours, but this doesn’t mean they can’t use their benefits and rewards packages to assist their staff. On a simplistic level it could be as little as a cash voucher to reward an employee idea of the month or an extra day’s holiday reward to a team that exceeds targets.

There is certainly untapped scope for employers to use reward and benefits more creatively to leverage engagement and in ways that won’t incur massive costs. However, as demonstrated by Accor Services’ study, unless engagement is aligned to wider organisational goals and objectives, its reach and impact will be dampened. Employees need to be able to make the link between day-to-day tactics that, for example, improve their working conditions, and their engagement with the organisation and their role.