For the world’s largest organisations, employee benefits are a significant capital investment, often the second or third largest line item on the balance sheet.
Yet, industry research suggests that UK organisations may be spending up to £15bn a year on workplace benefits that their people simply don’t take advantage of.
What a waste. But this isn’t just a waste of budget, it’s a failure of engagement.
When utilisation is low, the problem isn’t necessarily the package, it is a common communication failure that creates a massive impact.
Rescuing Reward: solving the Employee Benefits engagement gap
The most common mistake is assuming that awareness is a one-time event. We see organisations launch a gold-standard health or pension offer with a flurry of activity, only for it to disappear into the background.
Benefits communications should not take a one-and-done approach. Regular highlights of your offer to your people throughout the year, as well as using cultural moments to point to relevant benefits will help keep them front of mind.
The gap between intention and reality is wide.
While leadership believes they have provided a safety net purely by having a benefits offer, employees often feel a lack of appreciation for the investment. Either because they don’t understand what’s available or messaging didn’t reach them at the right time, in the right way, or in a language that felt relevant to their circumstances.
“This is a common challenge for organisations, ensuring that Benefits communications don’t feel blanket and throwaway.” says Francesca Elliott, Blue Goose Account Director and Strategist. “If your employee benefits and the messaging that supports them aren’t tailored to your people, they will naturally assume the benefit isn’t ‘for them’.”
The Invisible Paycut: why benefits communication fails the C-suite
This communication breakdown isn’t just an administrative headache, it has a direct impact on the bottom line:
- Erosion of the ‘Hidden Pay Cheque’: If an employee doesn’t understand the value of their total reward, they are effectively underpaid in their own minds. You are paying for a premium experience but receiving the loyalty of a base-salary employer.
- Talent Attrition: When communication fails to connect a benefit (like flexible working or mental health support) to the employee’s lived experience, they look for those solutions elsewhere – usually at a competitor.
- Strategic Drift: In Internal Communications and HR, it is our job to align the internal narrative with the corporate strategy. If one of the most tangible ways a company cares for its people (benefits) is poorly communicated, the entire corporate narrative of being a people-first business collapses.
Beyond the Broadcast: creative benefits communications strategies
Closing this gap requires moving beyond the broadcast model of internal comms.
We believe that the solution lies in a unique approach to communicating benefits. Where we match behavioral insights with unexpected, memorable activation.
The trick to striking benefits communications is about unravelling the complex.
Whether it’s gamifying a pension rollout to double engagement (as we did for the John Lewis Partnership), using distinctive visual mechanism to drive engagement with the entire benefits package for a global audience through a virtual benefits fair (as we did for BNP Paribas), the goal is to illuminate the benefits on offer and inspire your people to take advantage of them.
“A rogue page on the intranet is where amazing Benefits packages go to die.” says Francesca Elliot, Account Director and Strategist. “To continue to drive engagement with benefits you need a tailored approach to different people within your organisation, showing why the benefits you offer truly resonate with people.”
We don’t want the benefits to stay in the intranet graveyard, waiting desperately to be found.
We need to highlight what’s available in a way that feels personal, with messages triggered at the right moment for your people.
Auditing Resonance: improving ROI on benefits
The question for leadership should no longer be ‘How much are we spending on benefits?’ but rather: ‘How much of that spend is actually being felt by our people?’
If your benefits are invisible, they are effectively non-existent. It’s time to stop auditing the providers and start auditing the resonance.
Until you apply the same level of creative rigor to your internal engagement as you do to your external brand, your benefits offer will remain a costly silhouette.
If you want help reinvigorating your benefits engagement, contact Blue Goose today.
Image by: Printablue
