Delivering employee benefits

25 May 2019

This article was featured in the June 2019 issue of the magazine.

Samantha Mann CIPP MAAT MCIPPDip, CIPP senior policy and research officer, provides a report of a recent CIPD event

It is not often that I get a chance to attend a one-day conference and just listen, but the opportunity to stand in for our editor with a ‘press pass’ was just too good to miss, particularly as it was to be hosted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) on the subject of reward management.

In November 2018, the CIPD published, in partnership with LCP, their fifteenth reward management survey (http://bit.ly/2UPnw3n) which explored: “benefits employers in the UK offer to whom and why; how benefits packages are provided; and how they are communicated and evaluated”.

The conference further explored these themes with speakers from a broad range of global organisations in attendance to share their experiences through presentations or in expert panels that discussed specific themes and answered audience questions

...Narrative and communication was repeated again as critical...

It was a good day, thought provoking, entertaining and, above all, informative.

The report had identified that whilst benefits selection is important, so too is the administration of these benefits. 

As the day progressed common themes were identified, such as the importance of:

  • being able to tell a good story – to gain support for your plans

  • being clear about the principles of the business and matching reward solutions to those overarching principles

  • good data to provide evidence-based conclusions for your recommendations; but equally to use a mix of research methods i.e. workshops and surveys that provide a range of evidence that is both qualitative and quantitative 

  • the growing value of technology in data analytics. 

Narrative and communication was repeated again as critical when it came to successful gender pay gap reporting.

Charles Cotton, senior adviser to the CIPD for performance management, who chaired the conference, said of the day: “today’s event has reinforced the importance of reward and payroll professionals helping their organisations to reflect on why they’re offering benefits in the first place, how best to communicate these and the various ways that their impact can be assessed.”