How has employee performance been recently affected by the development of employee benefit packages?

Employee benefit packages have been changing throughout the recent years, especially since the covid-19 pandemic. Some rewards have been added and other rewards have been taken from employees. For example, childcare vouchers have been decreased from some organisation's rewards systems whereas, training and flexible working has been increased.

The main objective is to establish how performance is affected when employees are given rewards. More research should be conducted in what employees in accounting firms consider as rewards and how this impacts their performance. The three objectives for this research are; to determine whether performance has been affected negatively or positively through working remotely, to identify the effect the change of working days has on employee performance and, to identify the difference monetary and non-monetary rewards have on employee performance in accounting firms. Objective one will cover whether remote working is seen as a reward, whether employees perform highly when working from home and it will also consider the increase use of digital technologies while remote working. The second objective will cover whether having a four-day week increases employee performance or if there should be a different reward replacing this one to increase performance. Lastly, the last objective will cover monetary, non-monetary rewards and employee needs being met leads to high performance. All objectives aim to determine techniques for improving employee benefit packages in order to increase employee performance.

This research will be conducted in UK accounting firms. The sample will include the 16 accounting firms from a summer research placement I obtained. A secondary data analysis will be conducted to gain background information on performance being impacted by rewards. A literature review will also be conducted. Lastly, the primary research will go as followed: conducting a questionnaire with accounting firm employees, with follow-up interviews with some of these employees. The questionnaire will cover basic information on the research topic whereas, the interviews will cover more in-depth information. Both qualitative and quantitative data will be obtained from the primary research. The analysis of this data will be used to make recommendations to accounting firms for them to be able to increase employee performance. It will also be used to outline rewards which are already increasing employee performance so that accounting firms can retain them.

Performance will be measured against employee Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and training throughout the course of this research.