What are the new ideas which should shape benefits and reward strategy for organisations in the coming year?

This is a question we frequently get asked by our cilents. So to provide this valuable insight  we spend the last couple of months asking clients and prospects about  their priorities for the year ahead and how they will be addressed.

We then took time to pull together the thoughts shared by our new  ‘Edenred Practitioner Panel’, a group of people whose job it is to ensure benefits contribute to people performance into a new report. This study, which we have called Engage to Perform, finds that although benefits have the potential to play a critical role in supporting our businesses, we need to work harder than ever to make that investment pay off in five key areas:

• Contributing to business performance by aligning benefits and reward to employee engagement

• Making reward relevant through personalisation

• Using innovation to improve the employee benefits experience

• Increasing benefits uptake through communication

• Adopting financial education as a core benefit

And despite the fact that  budgets look set to remain tight in the year ahead, it is clear these ideas are being backed up with action as just under half of organisations (41%) take the opportunity to fully review benefits strategy in 2013.

In a year when many organisations are either implementing or preparing for auto-enrolment, this represents a significant movement to ensure that benefits play to their potential in supporting business performance.

Andy Philpott is sales and marketing director of Edenred

You can find copies of this white paper as well as other insight on e.hub our knowledge community for reward and benefits: http://edenred.co.uk/ehub or you can follow us on twitter: @edenreduk or @andy_philpott