Barnett Waddingham recently revealed new research into ‘The Employee Equation’ – the balance all business leaders must strike between meeting the needs of their employees and achieving their business goals. In the below extract, Partner and Head of Platform and Benefits Julia Turney outlines ‘the new normal’ that is making this balancing act difficult...
The pandemic heralded ‘the new normal’, accelerating changes in employee demands and ways of working faster than anyone could have predicted. The working landscape has since changed permanently, and employees are more empowered to strive for increased flexibility, better benefits packages, and more of a focus on values and purpose.
According to research from the Chartered Institute for Personal Development (CIPD):
- 40% of employers have seen an increase in requests for flexible working since the pandemic
- 66% of businesses believe including flexible working as an option in job advertisements is an important factor in attracting talent
- 39% of businesses say they will be more likely to grant flexible working requests compared to before the pandemic
The appetite to grant flexible working could change once the impacts from the wake of the pandemic and economic uncertainty begin to subside. But for now this desire for flexibility, alongside the emergence of trends such as quiet-quitting and the war for talent, is putting more businesses under pressure to increase spend to address employee demands and improve, or at least maintain, loyalty and retention rates.
For many companies it may be a case of adjusting to this new environment. This means it is not necessarily about increasing employee spend, but instead reviewing how and where it is spent to be more effective. This is where investigating ‘Employer DNA’ can highlight and map-out areas requiring investment, and where spend could have more of an impact.
