When it comes to employee attitudes about what binds them to their employers, perks are just gimmicks. What counts? Core benefits and compensation.

That’s according to a report by industry analyst George LaRocque, released by New York City-based payroll and benefits software developer Namely. The report indicates that in their quest to build a healthy company culture, employers should be focusing on the big things — core benefits and compensation — before they start adding employee engagement perks such as recognition, wellness, or rewards programs.

While the pressure is on for human resources professionals in the middle market to deploy strategic HR to produce results for company execs and an increasingly active regulatory environment, the report pointed to the best results lying in different directions.

Employees’ goals are to find meaningful work, experience efficient HR processes and receive competitive benefits, while the greatest potential return on investments comes from money put into core HR technology and improved employee benefits.

Gimmicks and perks, not so much. They may make great soundbites, but asked to rate employer-provided perks, 54 percent of employees chose “benefits and paid time off” as those that most drive engagement.

Asked which perks they felt had the greatest return on investment potential, almost 60 percent of those middle-market employees ranked “benefits and paid time off” well above rewards programs, team outings, office environment, snacks and recognition. So much for window dressing.

HR spends a lot of time considering the issue of employee engagement, but on the other side of the company, Namely said that finance has little priority around investing in it. Only 37 percent of respondents characterized finance’s priority level on measuring employee engagement, satisfaction or happiness as a “priority” or “significant priority.” It’s so unimportant to the finance end that only 8 percent of company respondents have actually implemented a strategy across their enterprise to measure employee engagement.

Instead, Namely reported that finance leaders are willing to increase budgets for such core HR initiatives as benefits (39 percent) or learning and development (34 percent), since they know those are important to employees.

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