It is obviously survey season. This time it is Thomsons Online Benefits’ “Employee Rewards Watch 2008″. Covering some 755 organisations they claim it is the UK’s largest reward survey. The survey ranges quite widely across the reward environment and provides some useful insights into the business and HR challenges respondents face. Some of the findings that I picked up on include:
- that more than a third of companies believe their basic salaries to be in the second quartile (ie, below the median) which is pretty much what you would expect statistically;
- more telling is the finding that a quarter did not know where they stood in the market;
- two thirds of respondents are planning to pay a bonus over the next twelve months;
- the commonest factors on which bonuses are to be paid include company performance (80%), individual performance (75%) and business unit performance (45%) which means that most are paying on business success but flexing the amount to individual performance;
- around a third of respondents also thought their reward strategy was not valued by employees or not well communicated to them – so communicate it then.
