How do your employee benefits stack up?

Here, we take a look at some of the key findings.

Views and reviews on benefits

80 per cent of companies said benefits are important and only 20 per cent of these have a structure in place. So although businesses in our landscape understand the importance of benefits, only a small number of businesses regularly review what benefits their staff are offered.

Maternity and paternity

19 per cent of all companies surveyed provided above statutory maternity pay, however only 14 per cent did this for fathers.

We found that offering anything above statutory pay is usually saved for executive level roles. However there is a clear difference between paternity and maternity cover, with paternity pay not being given the same level of consideration as maternity pay.

Benefits offered by sector

The majority of benefits packages are worth between £2,500 – £5,000 PA.

Small benefits are very popular – breakfasts and fruit, cycle to work schemes, season ticket loan, drinks after work, Krispy Krème Wednesdays, massages, eye tests, the list goes on.

Agencies offer fantastic and varied benefits. They perform less well on shares and bonuses, yet very well in areas like pensions and maternity packages, as you would expect from big businesses.

Ad tech companies perform very well with shares, bonuses and other fringe benefits. By and large, the majority of startup businesses are ad tech providers of one form or another and the benefits that these businesses offer seem to be reflective of a startup culture.

Media owners and publishers, meanwhile, perform very well in areas like pension, medical insurance and maternity and paternity cover.

Brands are an anomaly in our results. From our experience with big brands, we know they offer the most valuable benefits packages in areas like pensions, medical cover, bonuses and other ‘nice to have’ benefits, yet our results are not reflective of this. We had the fewest responses to our survey from brands and those that did respond tended to be smaller, more niche and often startup e-commerce businesses. So while we do not think that these results reflect the true nature of benefits packages in big brands, they do however confirm something else that we regularly see. Smaller companies sometimes take a closer look at how to engage and attract the very best people into their business and understand that, without being able to offer a ‘big brand’ or big benefits package, they may have to work slightly harder, or differently, to do so.

Pensions

We found that the majority of large companies surveyed (80 per cent) companies offer pensions, compared with 68 per cent of medium sized companies and 48 per cent of small companies.

Our survey was conducted by our financial controller Ben Steer, a qualified accountant with years of experience working for brands such as, Tate & Lyle and Heinz. With a background in economics, completing a BSc from the University of Bath and working in macroeconomic research, he has also been the main contributor to several Office of National Statistics surveys.

If you’d like some advice on how you can jazz up your benefits, we will be releasing more details over the coming weeks. For more information on this survey or the full results please contact us. We’d be more than happy to help.

Ben Steer, Financial Controller, Sphere Digital Recruitment

Tel: 020 3728 2973

Email: hello@spherelondon.co.uk

Web: www.spherelondon.co.uk

Twitter: @SphereDigRec