Employee benefits have become integral to organisations’ remuneration policies. But, as with pay policies, ‘reward’ strategies are affected by prevailing economic conditions. The true affect of the current ‘credit crunch’ has yet to be determined, but the uncertainty caused by the sub prime meltdown is manifest.

As specialists in advising private and public sector clients on structuring employee benefits packages, we wanted to find out how employers’ reward policies were likely to respond to the current economic climate. But we also wanted to get employees’ views about whether they thought their benefits might change in 2008 and their level of appreciation of, and confidence in, their reward policies.

The resulting findings from our research study – involving responses from 300 HR professionals (HR directors and HR managers) and 1011 employees throughout the UK – provide this insight.