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United Kingdom
In the UK, Employee Benefits are categorised by three terms:Flexible Benefits (Flex) and Flexible Benefits Packages, Voluntary Benefits and Core Benefits.
Flexible Benefits most often called a "Flex Scheme" is where employees are allowed to choose how a proportion of their remuneration is paid. Currently around a quarter of UK employers operate such a scheme.
. This is normally delivered by allowing employees to sacrifice part of their pre-tax pay in exchange for a car, additional holiday, a shorter working week or other similar benefits, or give up benefits for additional cash remuneration. A number of external consultancies exist that enable organizations to manage Flex packages and they centre around the provision of an Intranet or Extranet website where employees can view their current flexible benefit status and make changes to their package.
Voluntary Benefits is the name given to a collection of benefits that employees choose to opt-in for and pay for personally. These tend to be schemes such as the government-backed (and therefore tax-efficient) Bike2Work and Childcare Vouchers (Accor Services, Busybees, Sodexho) and also specially arranged discount schemes for employees such as group ISAs. Employee Discount schemes are often setup by employers as a perk of working at the organization. They can be run inhouse or arranged by an external employee benefits consultant.
Core Benefits is the term given to benefits which all staff enjoy, such as holiday, sick pay and sometimes flexible hours.
In the UK, the employee benefit market is split between larger employee benefit consultancies (Mercers, Watson Wyatt, Towers Perrin, Hewitt), the mid-market (Buck Consultants, SBJ, [[Thomsons Online Benefits], Gissings) and smaller bespoke advice & consultancy organisations. Technology provision is led by companies such as Thomsons Online Benefits.