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The potential impact of employee benefits on individuals and their dependants is significant and growing as new products and solutions come on to the market. The aim of this paper is to investigate how benefits impact on employees and the organization as a whole, and how organizations are choosing to inform their people about the type of benefits on offer.

Research conducted by AIG UK Benefits seeks to provide an insight into the current employee benefits environment and in particular to the areas highlighted above. The research consisted of a two‐stage study undertaken by the AIG UK corporate research and development team between November 2007 and January 2008.

The study highlights the differences between the perceptions of employers/HR professionals and employees when it comes to the awareness and understanding of the benefits on offer and asks whether employees are really to blame if they fail to appreciate the true value of their employers' voluntary employee benefits.

There is an opportunity for HR to improve benefits communications. The study looks at how one UK retailer has successfully implemented a strong communications program and presents steps that employers and reward professionals can take to improve their own benefits communications.

This article aims to review how one organization – Vinci – leveraged a strategic and integrated approach to employee benefits to unify three different businesses, each with their own, different set of T&Cs, employee benefits and benefit providers. This work was undertaken in the midst of economic recession that put significant pressure on the business to retain and reward its people.

The article provides best practice case evidence that outlines how effective employee consultation and buy‐in was generated, employee communication was delivered and understanding of the new employment package was disseminated to staff.

The paper demonstrates the positive and far‐reaching impact of the work to unify employee benefits provision across these merging organizations. With over 99 percent of employees signing their revised T&Cs and employees making savings of over £500,000 in tax and NICs (National Insurance Contributions), the work undertaken at the organization has, understandably, had a positive effect on employee turnover and overall levels of engagement.

The article presents a first‐hand account of the work carried out to bring the businesses together and ensure the company could offer a strong and engaging employment and benefits package.

Everyone works in expectation of some rewards, and welfare is one of them. In order to understand the impact of employee benefits on employees′ work‐motivation and productivity, questionnaires were sent to corporations which had undertaken employee benefit programmes. Some of the significant results of this study are: employee benefit programmes have greater impact on work‐motivation than on productivity; monetary benefit programmes are most highly valued by both executives and workers; there is a cognitive gap between management and worker on the importance of employee benefit programmes; different genders have different benefit demands; unmarried employees, more than married employees, perceive that employee benefits have a greater impact on job performance. Employees with different education levels and positions perceive different employee benefit impacts; and employee benefit programmes have greater influence on younger employees′ job performance.

The purpose of this research paper is to provide practitioners and researchers with guidance and ideas for benchmarking employee benefits in companies providing professional services. The research addressed employee benefits in multi‐owner accounting firms.

Data from a survey of a large number of multi‐owner accounting firms (CPA firms) were analyzed to examine professional employee benefits and to look at the relationship between firm size and benefits offered.

An analysis of survey results suggested that larger firms offer better benefits than smaller firms. Larger firms tend also to be more profitable. Various employee benefit metrics were examined.

The survey was limited to accounting firms in the United States, so the findings may have limited value for researchers and practitioners in other countries.

The better benefits offered by larger accounting firms may allow them to attract better personnel, possibly accounting for their greater profitability. If this is indeed true, then a good benefit package may well be a key success factor for accounting firms, and possibly for other professional services. Firms seeking to improve their competitive position may, therefore, find it advantageous to benchmark their professional employee benefits against the benefit packages of larger more profitable competitors.

This paper examines professional employee benefits in multi‐owner accounting firms and identifies metrics that could be useful to practitioners in benchmarking those benefits. The metrics identified and other findings may provide practitioners with ideas for benchmarking benefits in other professional service organizations.

A survey of employee benefits provided to host country non‐managerial employees in China by American firms indicates that these tend to change over time, vary by the size of the firm, and differ between wholly owned and joint ventures. Statistical analysis suggests that the use of certain extrinsic and intrinsic benefits tends to be positively perceived by Chinese employees, and in turn, these favorably impact specific dimensions of organizational performance. The findings show that American firms provide benefits that recognize established practices in China and the current needs of Chinese workers. Implications for employee benefits managers in foreign firms are discussed.

The purpose of the research is to examine the antecedent and employee well-being outcomes of employees' perceptions of benefits schemes.

Data were collected using both paper-based and web-based questionnaires over two time points (one month apart). The sample included 281 participants in eight companies in China. Structural equation modelling was employed to investigate the relationship between Chinese traditionality, perceived benefits schemes, job involvement and emotional exhaustion.

Chinese traditionality is an antecedent of employees' perceptions of benefits schemes. Perceived benefits schemes are negatively associated with emotional exhaustion. Moreover, job involvement mediates the relationship between perceived benefits schemes and emotional exhaustion.

The data were collected in eight manufacturing companies in China, which may raise concerns about the generalisability of findings across industries, nations and cultures. Larger, more representative and cross-contextual samples are needed for future research to test the results further.

Managers should anticipate that employees with different cultural values may develop dissimilar perceptions of the same benefits schemes. Hence, managers need to communicate the benefits schemes to distinct employee groups in different ways.

Based on the conservation of resources model, this research offers theoretical insights into the mechanisms through which perceived benefits schemes influence employee health well-being. In addition, this research tests an antecedent of perceived benefits schemes.

Using the job demands-resources (JD-R) model as a theoretical foundation, this study aims to explore the potential of organizational leisure benefit programs in the interplay of job demands and perceived work-life balance.

This article is based on qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews with 24 hospitality industry employees in Austria.

Thematic analysis revealed that organizational leisure benefits can play different roles in the context of job demands depending on the individual’s perceptions of work-life balance. Three major themes were identified, showing that organizational leisure benefits can be a multifaceted organizational resource (1) to facilitate employees’ leisure participation, (2) to boost employees’ recovery or (3) to meet the employees’ need for workplace fun. The results also demonstrated the limitations of organizational leisure benefits, showing that in case employees are constantly experiencing private duties that interfere with recovery during leisure time, leisure benefits do not play any role regarding their perception of work-life balance.

This study contributes to the scare literature on organizational leisure benefits and clarifies their potential, and limitations, as an emerging organizational resource. In particular, findings broaden existing research in the context of the JD-R model by showing that the notion of job resources can stretch beyond workplace resources and can also encompass organizational leisure support.

Employee benefits represent a large proportion of operational costs in most sectors, but discussions of their outcomes have been inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to decipher the effects of employee benefits on organizational commitment in a changing and largely uncertain environment.

Three repeated large-scale surveys in Greece during the recent recession are used (2012, 2013 and 2015, total n=3,498).

A new taxonomy of employee benefits based on employees’ subjective utility evaluations is developed and applied. Availability of benefits and changes in the allocation policies of benefits are found to significantly but not powerfully influence organizational commitment. The setting in which this exchange is realized is critical for the relationships developed.

The study is conducted in a single country during the recession and trough phases of the business cycle and employee benefit allocation is measured with employee perceptions. Future research is called to couple present findings with international research at diverse phases of the business cycle and objective or company-provided measures of employee benefits.

Employers are advised to draft long-term employee benefit strategies, avoid frequent adjustments and provide multiple types of employee benefits, to increase affective organizational commitment.

This is the first time employee benefits are treated as a whole, and effects of their allocation and of changes in their allocation are explored at the employee level.

Employee reward is central to contemporary debates about work and employment relations; and in the context of ongoing wage stagnation, benefits represent a growing proportion of total reward value. Past studies have shown that when employees perceive benefits as unfair, this has a negative impact on engagement, performance and retention. Yet no previous studies have explored the components of a benefits system that influence employees’ fairness concerns. Using organisational justice as a theoretical lens, the purpose of this paper is to examine how dimensions of an employee benefits system influence the fairness perceptions of employees.

This paper reports on a qualitative, inductive case study of the benefits system in a large finance and insurance company, drawing on three data sources: interviews with the company’s benefits managers, organisational documents and open-text responses from a benefits survey.

Three dimensions of the benefits system strongly influenced fairness perceptions – constraints on accessing and utilising benefits; prosocial perceptions about the fairness of benefits to third parties; and the transparency of employee benefits.

The study informs organisations and benefits managers about the important role of supervisors in perceived benefits usability, and how benefits may be managed and communicated to enhance employee fairness perceptions.

This study makes a conceptual contribution to the benefits literature through a detailed exploration of the type of organisational justice judgements that employees make about benefits; and identifying for the first time prosocial fairness concerns about the impact of benefits on third parties.

The present study aims to propose a novel employee-centric framework for the study of employer brand attractiveness. This framework disentangles the role of employer attributes, employee benefits and employee perceived value in the study of employer brands to better develop policies for talent attraction. Additionally, this study formulates a research agenda to help advance an employee-centric view of the employer’s brand management by following the tradition of customer-centric research and identifying benefits and forms of value that are yet unexplored.

This paper performs a systematic and critical review of the literature on employer brand attraction from the lens of means-end chains to examine how the notions of “employer attributes”, “employee benefits” and “perceived value” have been addressed in past studies and what relations have been established among these three concepts.

The results unveil the existing conflation among attributes, benefits and value in the conceptualization of employer brand attractiveness. By proposing an employee-centric framework following the tenets of current consumer-centric paradigms, this paper disentangles the notions of attributes, benefits and value in the creation of attractive employer brands; establishes a hierarchical relationship among them; and suggests studying the multiple paths of relationships between attributes and benefits. These conditions should help organizations understand how to create successful strategies to ultimately ensure that they are selected as employers of choice.

Further research is needed to clarify the domains in which the already studied empirical relations hold. This could be achieved by conducting a laddering process based on a means–end chain approach. Additionally, the impact of this framework on the construction of effective value propositions and employee market segmentation should be further explored.

This paper has revisited the construct of employer brand from a means–ends approach to propose an employee-centric view guiding employer brand strategies. As competition for the best employees sharpens, understanding how employer brand traits are valued in the eyes of different segments of employees and applicants may help organizations to develop more effective strategies to attract the best talent.