PH big spender on employee benefits, says survey

Four of 10 companies in Asia Pacific, including the Philippines, are spending more than 20 percent of their payroll on employee benefits, according to a recent survey.

In the Philippines alone, at least 44 percent of the companies surveyed said they were spending between 20-40 percent of their payroll on employee benefits.

This makes the Philippines, along with Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia, one of the biggest spenders on benefits.

Despite the significant allocation, a number of these same companies polled by Towers Watson, a global professional services company, believe that these benefits were not valued highly by their employees.

According to the 2013 Asia Pacific Employee Benefit Trends survey, only slightly more than half of companies surveyed said that their benefits were valued sufficiently by employees, while 15 percent believed that these benefits were not valued at all.

The study was conducted between February and March 2013 among 1,066 employers in Asia Pacific, and included regional data, as well as select country-specific data for China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.

In a statement, Towers Watson noted that what the results of the employee trends survey showed were that “employee value perception does not necessarily increase as spend increases.”

That is, those employers who are spending more on benefits are not necessarily going to see a corresponding increase in value perception, especially since a third of the companies polled were said to have not communicated to their employees these benefits.

Based on the study, there is a strong correlation between effective communication and benefit value perception: companies that communicate effectively tend to see higher employee value attached to benefits.

“We found that some employers are responding to the gap between actual cost and employee value perception by adding to the number of benefit programs in their portfolio. But rather than help, this may only widen the gap,” noted Matthew Jackson, director for benefits optimization, Asia Pacific of Towers Watson.

“As workforces continue to diversify, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ benefits portfolio is rarely the best solution. These employers would likely achieve a similar or better result by reviewing and adjusting their existing portfolio of benefits, and introducing employee choice, rather than adding more programs for everyone,” Jackson added.