Employee benefits for technology companies

Five things worth having a position on.

• Work design and workload. On-call rotas, release cycles and always-on expectations are workload structures, and they are visible in systems you already run. Covered in the psychosocial risk checker.
• Benefit provision and communication. Rapid hiring means a large share of people joined after the last announcement and know only what induction told them. Covered in the employee benefits guide.
• Absence and return to work. Flexible working makes absence harder to see, which is not the same as there being less of it. Covered in return to work plans.
• Access to the support that already exists. Support that lives inside a chat tool reaches people who are comfortable being seen to look for it. Worth having a route that is not. Covered in the employee assistance programme guide.
• Evidence and governance. The duty applies from the first employee, and the record from five. Covered in the employer duty of care guide.

The national figure for information and communication is not statistically significantly different from the all-industry rate, so it is not evidence about this sector and does not appear here. Nothing on this page predicts who might leave or who might burn out, because no data available to us supports a claim like that.

We are not going to show you an industry absence rate here. The obvious move would be to take the national figure for the nearest official industry classification and present it as this sector's number, and the reason we have not is that the classification is usually wrong for the sector as people understand it, and the difference from the all-industry figure is often not statistically significant anyway. A headline figure that has to be qualified into nothing in the next sentence is worse than no figure.

The national picture is genuinely useful, and it is published properly on UK sickness absence rates, with the definitions, the low-sample flags, and the reasons it describes a population and not your organisation.

The guides these questions lead into, in the order most employers need them. The employee benefits guide covers what each arrangement is, what it does not automatically include, and what to ask before buying or renewing. The employer duty of care guide covers what is actually required of you, including the written record threshold at five employees. And the psychosocial risk checker walks the six HSE Management Standards, which is where work design gets looked at properly.

For the national data, and the reasons it is context rather than a benchmark, UK sickness absence rates has the 2025 ONS release broken down eleven ways.

Nothing here describes your workforce. It describes questions that tend to matter in this kind of organisation.

Published data cannot tell you how your own people are doing, or whether what you pay for is being used. Those are answered by asking, and the answers are yours rather than a benchmark's.