Employee welfare, from vouchers to childcare services: here are the benefits most sought after by employees

The sectors with the highest uptake are the metalworking and engineering sector and the services sector (reported by 72 per cent of the companies surveyed), followed by the retail sector (50 per cent) and manufacturing other than engineering (40 per cent). A notable development is the uptake amongst small and medium-sized enterprises, where welfare schemes have grown more than in large companies (68%), but their presence in micro and small enterprises has also been growing rapidly over the last three years.

The main reasons why companies choose to introduce corporate welfare schemes can be attributed to a number of factors: an increase in employees’ purchasing power, a reduction in labour costs for the company, the recruitment and retention of staff, and a focus on employees’ health and wellbeing.

Welfare schemes are more often governed by company regulations (44%) than by collective bargaining agreements (37%), whether at national (28%), company (8%) or regional (1%) level. Sixteen per cent of schemes are ‘discretionary’, meaning they are not governed by binding legislation or contracts. Finally, it should not be overlooked that 96 per cent of welfare providers have seen an increase in the number of schemes they manage and in their turnover over the last three years.

According to Aiwa’s president, Emmanuele Massagli (Lumsa University, Rome, and expert member of the CNEL), corporate welfare has ‘now come of age and must decide what to do “when it grows up”’. The challenge lies in rediscovering and updating the goods and services with the strongest social focus, adding to what is already provided for in Article 51(2) of the TUIR measures for the care of pets, sustainable mobility, the reimbursement of rent for students living away from home to pursue higher education, the transfer of welfare credits to colleagues with care needs and to the third sector, and life insurance policies covering death in the course of everyday activities’.

For fringe benefits, the tax-free threshold is 1,000 euros for employees without dependent children (2,000 euros for those with tax-dependent children), the same tax regime is set to apply in 2027, whilst in 2028 the figure will revert to the ‘standard’ €258.23 (the former 500,000 lire) in the absence of corrective measures by the government. “It would be good if the financial threshold for these benefits were set permanently at 1,000 euros,” says Massagli, “to put an end to the ‘back-and-forth’ we see from time to time.”