Isio insights: Maximising value from employee benefits

The research* reveals eye-opening insight into the UK workforce’s attitudes towards work, finances, moving jobs and employee benefits. It aims to help employers, particularly senior HR leaders, understand how their organisations can maximise value from their benefits packages and even harness the benefit package to address staff turnover challenges.

The research, which has been carried out in conjunction with YouGov, surveyed over 7,500 UK employees from the private sector. What people told us may challenge some long-held views about the best way to design and operate employee benefits. The sheer size of our sample means that we can look at data by industry, geography, ethnicity, religion, education, disability, sexuality, home ownership, even the number of children in a household.

^{*In conjunction with YouGov, Isio surveyed 7,674 private sector employees in June 2023 on a range of issues surrounding employee benefits and personal finance concerns. Responses for don’t know or prefer not to say answers have been removed, unless explicitly shown.}

The result gives our clients a comprehensive look into what’s working in employee benefits, who it’s working for, and whether the design of the benefit package is providing poor value for some (or even unintentionally discriminating against) certain groups of employees. The data also gives us insight into the types of people who are most likely to be looking for a new job in the next year and how best to address that staff churn through maximising the value of their employee benefits.

Themes that are emerging from the data are an increased demand for flexibility from employees and, somewhat surprisingly given much recent focus on diversity, there are results that lead to challenging conclusions when analysed by ethnicity.

We’ll be updating this page with new papers weekly. The first paper, "Old jobs new tricks", looks at the role of the employer benefits package in helping reduce employee turnover. The second, "The benefits sweet shop", explores which benefits are most impactful in attracting and retaining employees. The third, "Weathering the storm", shines the light on financial stress. The fourth paper, "The power of knowledge", shines a light on financial confidence and financial understanding and the fifth, "Back to school", looks at how these can be improved.