Report 2024: The growing importance of employee benefits

The need for a strong employee benefits offering has been recognised for well over a century now, dating back to 1908 when the first state pension was introduced.

Recent years have seen employees place increasing value on their benefits package. According to Zest’s most recent Employee Benefits Report, today, six in ten (56%) of UK employees would switch roles for an improved workplace benefits package and almost half (47%) now say that a good benefits package is the most important thing that they look for in employment – up from 42% recorded in Zest’s Cost of Living Report, published in 2023.

Last year, amid a particularly tough economic backdrop, our findings unveiled an unwelcome spectre of inadequate benefits packages, with almost six in ten (56%) employees admitting they were not using the benefits on offer to them and four in ten (39%) believing that the benefits on offer to them were completely irrelevant to their personal situation.

This year, we’ve once again commissioned our partners at Opinium to survey 500 HR leaders and 2,000 UK adults to further understand how, if at all, the employee benefits landscape has improved and whether employee demand has shifted.

The good news is that our latest report suggests initial progress has been made. Employers seem to have made some positive changes, pushing on with investment in benefits packages, better matching general employee demand for wellbeing support and aligning on the future of work.

However, there remains a clear disconnect between what is that employees want and what it is that employers are offering with some of the starkest disconnect surrounding levels of personalisation and communication employees are now expecting.

In a world where growing value is now placed on employee benefits, and where employees aren’t afraid to move to get what they want, the bottom line is that organisations who fail to meet the needs of their employees are at risk of missing out on the best talent.

Read the full 2024 Employee Benefits Report available here.