Reciprocal engagement: The missing link between cost efficiency & wellbeing
Do you know about the new rules of employee engagement? Our exclusive, global study spanning 10 countries and 8,700 employees reveals that the rules of employee engagement have changed. ‘Reciprocal engagement’ isn’t just a new hot topic; it’s a requirement employees have of their employer, and it impacts how much of themselves they’re willing to give to your business. Read on to get to grips with the new rules and how to apply them in your workplace.
In a hurry? Here are the top three things to know about our blog on reciprocal engagement: the link between cost-efficiency and wellbeing.
1. Engagement is now a two-way deal, not something you extract: Employees are consciously choosing how much energy they give. If they don’t feel supported, invested in, or treated fairly, they won’t go above and beyond, and many will leave. Reciprocal engagement is no longer a “nice to have”; it’s table stakes for retention and performance.
2. Wellbeing isn’t a cost, it’s a resilience strategy with ROI: The new equation is clear: cost-efficiency + wellbeing = resilience. Cutting wellbeing may save money short term, but it fuels burnout, absenteeism, and turnover. Smart, low-cost benefits (salary sacrifice, leave purchase, discounts) can improve wellbeing and save the business money at the same time.
3. What employees want is broader than pay and more personal: Pay still matters, but employees now expect fairness, flexibility, workload protection, financial wellbeing support, recognition, and real career development. Crucially, they want to feel seen as individuals, not just rewarded for outputs. How well you meet these expectations directly determines engagement levels.
Got time to stick around? Let's dive a little deeper.
The new reality of work in 2026
Have you read about the new rules of engagement? Get your free copy of our global study here.
The 2026 workplace landscape is changing. While Gen Z is entering the workforce with clear expectations around growth, wellbeing and balance, there is a quiet shift impacting every employee in your business, regardless of age.
The economic environment is playing a role. Rising business operational costs and employer NIC increases put pressure on an organisation’s financial stability. Redundancies, alongside a hesitant approach to hiring, have seen unemployment in the UK rise to 5% -- an all-time high.
Employees are feeling the impact. Burnout and stress at work are at a record high, and the 3% median pay increase of 2025 – also predicted for 2026 – isn’t keeping up with inflation, putting pressure on employees’ finances.
Our latest UK guide, ‘Driving resilience beyond the 2025 budget’, champions a new equation: cost-efficiency + wellbeing = resilience, giving you a tangible strategy for saving money while investing in wellbeing, which is the path to sustainable workplace resilience.
Employees need support, and businesses need to find efficiencies and reciprocal engagement as the bridge between the two.
What is reciprocal engagement?
Reciprocal engagement, or reciprocity, is when employers recognise and reward employees for the energy they invest in their roles. Employees are demanding a mutually beneficial employer-employee relationship that goes beyond the paycheck and empowers them to live a fulfilled life.
HR trends 2026: Why HR and reward professionals are talking about it
Our global study brings employee perspectives of reciprocal engagement to the forefront. Alongside the 8 shades of employee engagement, it reveals why and how people engage differently with your business.
The expectation that you show appreciation isn’t new; 66% of employees are prepared to leave if they feel undervalued, as we explore in our blog, ‘Retain Top Talent with Our Seven Employee Retention Tips’.
Today, your workforce doesn’t just want to feel appreciated for what they do; they want you to go deeper, recognising who they truly are and understanding their unique drivers.
A two-way exchange
Businesses thrive when employees are willing to go above and beyond, but the employee of today practices measured engagement, a topic we reveal in our global study and will dive into another time.
What you need to know here is that how you reciprocate determines how much of themselves they’re willing to give to your business. We can sum it up in three phrases that reflect their mindset:
If you don’t prioritise my wellbeing, I’ll leave.
If you don’t support me, I won’t go above and beyond.
If you don’t invest in me, I won’t invest in you.
If you want to retain top talent, motivate, engage and create a high-performance culture, you must practice reciprocal engagement.
Trust, fairness, and psychological safety
Reciprocal engagement helps create an environment of trust and psychological safety, both of which are vital to sustaining a high-performing workforce. Learn more about this in our blog, ‘Building a sustainable, future-focused, high-performance culture’.
The bottom line: Engagement is no longer something you extract; it’s something you exchange.
The business case: Why reciprocity drives performance
Reciprocity drives performance, and you can measure the return on investment (ROI) of your engagement and wellbeing initiatives through several key metrics.
Here are some examples of how reciprocity drives performance to build into your business case:
- Wellbeing initiatives improve performance: Healthy employees are more energised, engaged, motivated and focused. They’re also less stressed and less likely to be absent. All these elements together make for a more productive workforce.
- Reducing absenteeism: The per-employee average absenteeism rate in 2025 was 9.4 days, costing UK employers nearly £400 million a week. The more present your employees are, the higher their output. Read our blog, ‘How to create a preventative health strategy in seven steps’, to learn how to create a healthier workforce.
- Improve employee retention and productivity: 26% of employees would leave a role where their wellbeing wasn’t a business priority (CIPD). Reducing employee turnover helps cut your recruitment bill, minimises downtime and prevents loss of valuable skills.
- Burnout: The Burnout Report 2026 reveals that high stress is driving more workers to take long-term sick leave. With 91% of adults reporting extreme levels of stress (Mental Health UK), this poses a significant risk. Dr Keith Grimes shares his story in our blog, ‘Reaching & Recovering from Burnout: Breaking the Stigma’.
Reciprocity reduces these risks through prioritising wellbeing, resilience and workplace satisfaction, making it crucial to build it into your employee engagement strategy.
How do we measure whether employees feel the relationship is fair?
We’ve mentioned fairness above, but it’s something that requires further reflection. Fairness is subjective and varies from employee to employee. Remember what we said about the 8 shades of engagement? That’s 8 different perspectives on what work means to your employees, and 8 different perspectives on fairness.
Capture your workforce’s sentiments on fairness through engagement surveys that include questions that reveal perceptions of trust, equality, and psychological safety. Gather insights on whether employees feel like your leaders listen to feedback and keep their promises.
You can also track the ROI of your current wellbeing and reward investments. If your current strategy isn’t delivering desired improvements, it could be because your employees don’t feel they’re sufficient enough to warrant a more considered effort from them.
The equation: Cost‑efficiency + wellbeing = resilience
The cost-efficiency + wellbeing = resilience equation, also known as your new true north, feeds the narrative of the latest guide. Sign up for our webinar on 24th February for tangible ways to bring it to life.
Here’s how it works:
- Cost‑efficiency: With the cost of doing business and paying for your people rising, we recognise the importance of driving cost-efficiencies and reducing overheads.
- Wellbeing: Making cuts to wellbeing initiatives may lead to short-term savings but will have long-term impacts through increased absenteeism and employee turnover.
- Resilience: The true path to resilience comes from driving efficiencies while also investing in wellbeing, utilising money-saving employee benefits, such as salary sacrifice schemes, and delivering additional value to employees through a suite of holistic wellbeing benefits.
Investing in wellbeing drives reciprocal engagement, nurturing highly engaged employees and creating a more resilient future.
What’s the right balance between cost‑efficiency and employee support?
The brilliant thing about wellbeing initiatives is that they can actually drive cost-efficiencies. We give two examples of this in our guide to driving resilience, one of which is from our own experience.
Our HR team recognised the potential of our Annual Leave Purchase scheme and made small changes that had a significant impact. Given its popularity, we decided to give our colleagues more. We increased the number of days they could purchase from 10 to 15, opened the application window one month early, and extended the repayment period to make it more affordable.
We realised a 30% uplift in applications and a 20% increase in business savings, which equated to 4.4% of our annual NIC bill.
An Annual Leave Purchase scheme is a benefit that improves work-life balance and employee wellbeing. The best part is that delivering it to our workforce saves us money.
It’s the perfect example of the equation in action: supporting wellbeing without increasing costs.
Which benefits deliver the highest perceived value per £1 spent?
On average, employees save £1,200 per year using our discounts and cashback-earning Pluxee Card. In our guide to strengthening your employee value proposition (EVP), we reveal the average value of the 3% pay increase across three pay brackets. Compare the take-home value of that increase to the potential savings employees can make through the right employee benefits, and it becomes very clear which delivers the highest perceived value per £1 spent.
How do we protect wellbeing during budget cuts or restructuring?
HR teams are always being asked to do more with less, and wellbeing and engagement initiatives often face scrutiny during budget cuts, especially when restructuring is involved.
Essentially, you need to build the business case for wellbeing, and our blog, ‘HR budget review & your wellbeing strategy: Build a business case in 4 steps’, will help you get it right and secure your wellbeing budget.
Our blog, ‘Using Maslow’s Theories to Keep Employee Engagement High During Business Transformation’, will also help you navigate reciprocal engagement during organisational change.
What employees expect in return for their engagement
So, how do you reciprocate? What do employees want in return for their engagement, commitment and loyalty?
- Fairness: They want you to treat them fairly and equally, and to provide them with what they feel is a fair recompense for their continued efforts toward your business’s success.
- Flexibility: In our new rules of engagement report, Linda De Coene, HR Director for Belgium & Luxembourg at Pluxee, reveals that, “Flexibility extends beyond simply deciding to work remotely; it involves the ability to manage your work effectively and make informed decisions. For this to happen, you need to create the conditions that allow people to decide what works best for them.”
Em, a UK social worker contributing to the report, says,
Finding the right work-life balance is a constant juggling act. I’m always trying to find a sweet spot, but it’s tough when work demands are high. Honestly, keeping time for myself is what slips away the fastest. When work infringes too much on my time, I question the purpose of life.
- Financial wellbeing support: Our report reveals that employees seek authentic connections – it’s not just about money. Still, when salaries can’t keep pace with inflation, and money worries cost the UK economy, it pays to invest in employee financial resilience.
- Workload protection: We wrote a blog specifically for the finance industry, but the principles apply to most – read it here. In it, we discuss redesigning workloads and expectations to reduce the risk of burnout, encouraging managers to reduce unnecessary complexity and improving working practices with tech and deadline management.
- Recognition: Recognition, reward and appreciation are a fundamental part of your reciprocal engagement strategy, and recognition features in every psychological and workplace theory around motivation. Explore ‘10 employee recognition ideas that help retain top talent’.
Career development is a game-changer: training, mentorship, and stretch projects. Recognition is crucial, too—spot awards, public praise, peer-to-peer appreciation.
- Career development: Kimberley Rowbottom, HR Director here at Pluxee UK, discusses the role of career development in her foreword for our guide to driving resilience. Investing in employees’ progression path is reciprocal engagement, a way of helping them better themselves and grow, opening up a world of opportunities.
Are employees expecting too much in this new world of give-and-take? We don’t think so, especially when all the examples of reciprocal engagement we’ve listed above are also good for your business.
How employers can practice reciprocal engagement
The list above gives you plenty of ways to practice reciprocal engagement: fairness, flexibility, financial wellbeing support, recognition and career development. Next, we’ll offer practical steps to make reciprocal engagement part of your organisational culture.
- Listen, act and communicate: Listening to what employees want and need from you is vital, but it’s all just words unless you take action. Ensure you communicate your plans, so your employees understand the steps you’re taking and the timeline for change.
- Offer high‑value, low‑cost benefits: As we shared earlier, employee discounts and cashback schemes are high-value employee benefits you can implement on a budget. Salary sacrifice schemes also make expensive purchases, like an electric vehicle, more affordable and are tax-efficient for them and your business.
- Train managers to model reciprocity: Poor managers cause 67% of employees to consider quitting (The Workers Union). Invest in training managers to be empathic leaders and to understand the importance of reciprocity.
- Protect wellbeing during cost‑cutting: Ringfence the investment set aside for employee wellbeing initiatives when assessing where you can make savings. Better still, embed solutions that enhance wellbeing and save your business money, such as a salary sacrifice and Annual Leave Purchase scheme.
- Build trust through transparency: Communication is vital to the process. You could be making plans and implementing wellbeing programmes in the background, but if your employees aren’t aware of them, they could leave before you set them live. Bring them in early, be transparent, create a forum for open and honest communication and create a culture of trust.
The risks of not prioritising wellbeing
What happens when you don’t prioritise employee wellbeing and reciprocal engagement?
- Higher turnover: 26% of employees will leave if you don’t offer wellbeing support.
- Lower productivity: Healthy employees are more present and productive.
- More burnout: 91% of employees are working with stress levels that can lead to burnout. It takes months to recover from, which increases absenteeism and negatively impacts productivity.
- Increased absenteeism: Unhealthy and stressed employees are more absent, but so are disengaged employees. Our blog, ‘Re-Engaging the Disengaged Employee’, explores why an engaged workforce is an asset.
- Reduced employer brand strength: Your employer brand helps you attract top talent, fuelling sustainable growth and reducing the time and expense of recruiting.
Reducing burnout in palliative care
When it comes to needing your workforce to go above and beyond, to bring the commitment and energy, the situation doesn’t get more intense than it does for people working in palliative care.
Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Acorn's dedicated team provide psychological, emotional and practical support, helping families through grief and isolation. Fatigue and burnout pose a significant risk, which is why Acorns Children’s Hospice approached us seeking a way to boost physical and mental health.
They embedded our gym discounts to make it more affordable for these incredible people to have an outlet. Movement helps us release stress, and a gym session after a difficult day helps employees in palliative care work through their feelings, build strength and resilience, and come to a place of rest.
The future of engagement is reciprocal
To bring the cost-efficiency + wellbeing = resilience equation to life, reciprocal engagement is essential. Understanding that you need to give as much as you’re asking from your employees to drive a loyal and high-performing culture.
Resilience is the ultimate goal since it enables you to withstand economic changes. Personal resilience is also crucial for sustainable growth. Learn more about both in our blog, ‘Personal Resilience Vs Workplace Resilience’.
We’ve referenced two new guides in this blog post: the first is our global study on the new rules of engagement, and the second is our new UK guide on driving resilience after the 2025 Budget announcement.
Click below to get your free copy of each:
Sources:
Related articles
