What Ireland’s Biggest Benefits Survey Tells Us About the Future of Hybrid Work and What It Means For Your Business
Every year we keep a close eye on the data that shapes how Irish employers and employees experience work. Today Morgan McKinley released their Employee Benefits Ireland Guide 2026: What our Workforce Really Wants report, drawing on responses from over 1,200 employers and employees representing an estimated workforce of more than 600,000 people. It brings us some findings and insights that every leader, HR professional and people manager in the future of work in Ireland should have eyes on if they want to thrive in the future of work.
The headline story is not what you might expect. It’s not about perks, pay or pensions (though all three feature heavily). The real story buried in this data is about the gap between what employers think they’re offering and what employees are actually experiencing and nowhere is that gap more consequential than in hybrid and flexible working.
Here are our key takeaways, and what they mean for building a thriving remote and hybrid team in 2026.
The Quick Headlines 🎯
- Hybrid working is now a baseline expectation, not a differentiator, ranked in the top benefits by ~30% of employees across every generation.
- 73% of employers offer hybrid working, but only 61% of employees say they receive it, a 12-point gap that points directly to a management and execution problem.
- 46.8% of employers offer other flexible working options, but only 28% of employees report receiving them, a gap of nearly 19 points that suggests flexibility is being lost in translation between policy and practice.
- 38.5% of employers say their model requires 5 days on-site, but only 23.1% of employees report actually working fully on-site, meaning the lived reality of work is already more flexible than formal policy in many Irish organisations.
- Fully remote working has significant unmet demand, with employee desire consistently outpacing availability, particularly in Technology (43%), Professional Services (26%) and Financial Services.
- Leadership Development is confirmed as the #1 talent management priority according to IBEC’s 2025 HR Trends data, the missing link between policy and practice.
What Do These Mean For Your Business?
1) The Debate About Where People Work Is Over. The Question Now Is How Well They’re Being Led.
Despite media noise about return-to-office mandates and big brand policy shifts, the Morgan McKinley data tells a clear and consistent story: hybrid working is now a permanent fixture of the Irish employment landscape.
Almost one in three employees across every generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z alike, rank hybrid working amongst their most important benefits. This cross-generational consistency is striking. It tells us that hybrid working is no longer a millennial preference or a pandemic hangover. It responds to universal workforce needs: reduced commuting, greater control over time, and improved work-life balance.
And employers know this. Nearly three quarters (73%) say they offer hybrid working. The challenge is that only 61% of employees say they actually receive it.
That 12-point gap is not a policy gap. Organisations have written the policies. It is a leadership and delivery gap. Team leaders and managers who haven’t been equipped to make hybrid work in practice are the single biggest barrier between a hybrid policy on paper and a hybrid experience employees actually value.
This mirrors exactly what we saw in IBEC’s 2025 HR Trends data, where only 16% of companies reported full compliance with their own hybrid policies, and over 60% estimated their staff were less than 100% compliant. The lesson is the same in both datasets: compliance follows confidence, and confidence comes from capability.
What this means for your business: The companies pulling ahead right now are not the ones adding more policies. They’re the ones investing in how work gets done, equipping their managers with the tools, frameworks and mindset to lead distributed teams with intention and consistency. That’s the competitive edge in 2026.
2) Benefits Are a Powerful Retention Lever, But Only When Employees Can Actually Feel Them
The Morgan McKinley data is unambiguous on this: over two-thirds of employees (68%) say their benefits package plays a significant role in their loyalty to their employer. Benefits are not window dressing. They are a retention strategy.
But here’s the tension. More than one in three employees (38%) perceive their benefits package as below market, even as employers largely rate their own offering as competitive. That perception gap is quietly eroding the return on investment that organisations are making in their people.
Hybrid working is at the heart of this dynamic. Employees who feel they have real, consistent access to flexibility are more likely to feel their benefits are competitive. Employees who are told they have hybrid working but experience inconsistency, manager resistance or unspoken pressure to be in the office more than the policy suggests, those employees feel underserved, regardless of what the policy document says.
The report is direct on the solution: hybrid working appears to be most effective when it is structured, clearly communicated and applied consistently.
What this means for your business: Offering hybrid where a job can be done remotely is now a market expectation. Delivering hybrid consistently, equitably and with management confidence is what actually drives loyalty. If your managers are not equipped to do that, you are spending on a benefit that isn’t landing and that’s an avoidable loss.
3) The Generational Picture Has a Critical Blind Spot and It’s Your Junior Talent
One of the most important findings in the report is one that tends to get overlooked in broader hybrid conversations. While hybrid working is valued consistently across all generations, Gen Z employees are the least likely to report actually receiving it, at 49% compared to 62-63% for Gen X and Gen Y.
This is not a coincidence. Early-career employees are more likely to be in junior roles, on probation or in positions where managers feel less confident about remote delivery. When a manager hasn’t been trained to onboard, develop and build trust with someone they rarely see in person, the path of least resistance is to quietly apply a higher in-office expectation to junior staff.
The data also shows that younger employees are significantly less likely to have access to pension and health insurance, reflecting how eligibility rules and tenure thresholds disadvantage people at the start of their careers. The same structural inequity is playing out in flexible working.
For employers, this is a retention and talent pipeline risk. Gen Z workers who experience inflexibility early in their careers are exactly the cohort most likely to leave and most likely to share that experience publicly.
What this means for your business: Manager training that specifically addresses leading early-career employees in hybrid environments is not a nice-to-have. It is a talent retention priority. If your managers don’t know how to build trust, set expectations and develop junior people remotely, you are losing your pipeline.
4) Fully Remote Is Not Going Away and Unmet Demand Is a Talent Risk
The report shows that fully remote working is currently offered by around 19% of employers overall, but employee demand for it consistently outpaces supply, particularly in Technology (43%), Professional Services (26%) and Financial Services.
The BCG and Flex Index research we referenced in our IBEC Special Edition remains instructive here: fully flexible firms grew revenues 1.7x faster than mandate-driven firms between 2019 and 2024. The competitive case for enabling remote work is not just about employee satisfaction. It is a business performance argument.
For employers not yet offering fully remote options, the question is not whether to do it. It’s whether you have the management infrastructure to do it well. Poorly managed remote work is worse than no remote work. But well-managed remote work, with clear expectations, structured communication and leaders who know how to build culture across distance, is a genuine differentiator in a competitive talent market.
What this means for your business: The organisations winning the talent market right now are not just advertising remote roles. They are building the management capability to back it up. That’s what separates an employer of choice from an employer making promises they can’t keep.
5) The Leadership Moment and the Data Has Named the Priority
Perhaps the most significant signal in the entire Morgan McKinley report is not about hybrid working at all. It’s about what makes hybrid working succeed or fail.
Across multiple sections of data there is a consistent thread: the benefits that employees feel and value are the ones that are visible, frequently used, and embedded into day-to-day working practices. Benefits that live in policy documents, that employees aren’t sure they’re entitled to, or that vary unpredictably depending on who their manager is – are below the line or invisible. And invisible benefits don’t retain people.
This is a leadership problem. And the IBEC 2025 HR Trends data confirmed it directly: Leadership Development is the #1 talent management priority for Irish employers, with 14% naming it as their top focus and 44% placing it in their top three.
The best managers today are learning to empower rather than control, build culture regardless of location, drive performance by outcomes rather than presence, and create consistency of experience for their teams wherever they sit.
The Great Place to Work 2025 Employee Experience in Ireland study reinforces this. Among Ireland’s Best Workplaces, 49% of employees work hybrid and 16% are fully remote. When trust leads, success follows.
What this means for your business: The differentiator in 2026 is not your policy. It is not your office. It is how well your managers lead. The businesses that equip their leaders to work intentionally across distributed teams will be the ones that attract talent, retain it, and build cultures that outlast market volatility.
The Grow Remote Takeaway
Taken together, the Morgan McKinley 2026 Benefits data paints a picture that will be familiar to anyone who has been working in this space.
Ireland’s organisations have done the hard work of defining and creating hybrid policies. Most of them are good policies. But policy without capability is just a document. The gap between what employers say they offer and what employees say they experience, that 12-point hybrid gap, the Gen Z access gap, the EAP awareness gap, the L&D gap, these are all symptoms of the same underlying challenge.
Managers have not been equipped to deliver the hybrid employee experience that organisations are promising.
That is the gap we built Lead From Anywhere to close.
Our training gives managers and team leaders the practical frameworks, skills and confidence to lead hybrid and remote teams with clarity and consistency, from onboarding and performance conversations to building culture and managing outcomes across distance.
The question is no longer whether hybrid is here to stay. It clearly is. The question is whether your managers are equipped to make it work, for every employee, at every career stage, every day.
Ready to close the gap between your hybrid policy and your people’s experience?
👉 Explore Lead From Anywhere: https://bit.ly/grlfamarch
Sources: Morgan McKinley Ireland Benefits Guide 2026; IBEC HR Trends 2025; Flex Index / BCG 2019-2024 Revenue Growth Analysis; Great Place to Work Employee Experience in Ireland 2025.
Featured Image by by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
