Professional development and wellbeing benefits are top priority for employers

New research shows that nearly all UK employers (97%) expect to maintain or increase their spend on employee benefits over the next two years.

The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) and consultancy company LCP surveyed 568 HR practitioners about their organisation's benefits provision and found that eight in ten employers (81%) intend to spend about the same amount on employee benefits as they currently do, while 16% plan to increase their investment.

Overall, more than a quarter of employers plan to increase investment in health and wellbeing benefits and two in five will spend more on people development.

Asked which benefits in particular they intend to spend more on in the next two years (even if their overall funding will remain steady or decrease), 43% named professional development, which includes training, paid study leave and professional subscriptions.

In second place on 29% was health and wellbeing, including occupational sick pay, employee assistance programmes and flu jabs. Financial benefits, such as pension schemes, loans to help staff in financial hardship and free money and debt advice, was the third most popular area of increased spending on 25%.

However, the report also warned that employers could be missing the opportunity to establish how effective their benefits are as the majority of respondents (74%) don't currently conduct a review of their benefit spend.

"The people profession has an important role to play in analysing spend on benefits to see if the business, its people and other key stakeholders are getting maximum value from them," said Charles Cotton, senior reward and performance adviser at the CIPD. "Analysis provides crucial evidence for making changes for the better if this is not the case."