Summary: We’re stuck in a vicious benefits cycle with employers investing, employees not noticing, HR struggling to prove value, investment coming under pressure and employees feeling less supported. It’s time to remove friction across the benefits journey and apply a smarter technology overlay to existing provisions.
Two-thirds of UK employers expanded their benefits offering in the past year.
Nine in ten of them say their wellbeing investment is supporting business outcomes, and most would tell you their employees are well looked after.
Only their employees would tell you something rather different.
New research from Benifex, based on a survey of 7,000 employees and 600 HR leaders across seven countries, found that only 60 per cent of UK employees rate their overall employee experience as good or excellent. This places the UK only second from the bottom.
Moreover, 95 per cent of UK HR leaders rate their own employee experience as good or excellent. That 35 percentage point gap should itself give pause for thought. But what it’s concealing is more important.
Employees aren’t failing to notice investment because there isn’t enough of it. They’re failing to notice it because they can’t find or connect it to their own lives. That is a design and delivery problem.
The visibility problem
Only 29 per cent of UK employees say their employer has expanded their benefits in the past year, while 66 per cent of employers say they have done exactly that.
Nearly half say their offering has stayed the same. One in nine thinks it has gotten worse. The investment is real, but clearly the perception isn’t tracking with it.
The temptation is to read this as a communications failure. That could be part of the issue, but I would look further and consider this as a structural issue.
Nearly half of UK employees say it’s difficult to access and understand the full value of their rewards and benefits. That points to a bigger problem than communication.
If you have to jump across multiple systems, battle poor navigation or make decisions without any meaningful support, you will simply give up.
Only 60 per cent of UK employees rate their overall employee experience as good or excellent.
Removing friction across the benefit journey
Most employees are used to the simplicity of modern consumer tech that does a lot of the thinking for them, where everything is personalised and immediate.
When their benefits platform experience feels nothing like that, the contrast is jarring enough to disengage them entirely.
We need to remove the friction across the entire benefit journey. If an employee is choosing a benefit that complements their sick pay policy, that policy should be one click away.
If they’re buying additional annual leave, they should be able to check their remaining entitlement in the same place. Every extra step, every system switch, is a point at which the value of that benefit is lost.
The role of technology
The good news is that this doesn’t require tearing up existing benefit schemes and starting again. What it requires is a smarter technology overlay that sits on top of existing provision and makes it accessible, navigable and relevant to the individual employee.
Your employees are the same people who won’t buy a product without reading reviews or watching an unboxing video. They are sophisticated, information-hungry consumers. The employers closing that gap are using technology differently.
They are using social proof to show employees what colleagues are actually using benefits for and deploying AI navigation that surfaces the right benefit at the right moment.
They offer curated support based on what employees flag as priorities, with content linked to life stages rather than an alphabetical list no one reads.
If you fix the friction you will improve employee experience and make the case for every pound already being spent
Why this matters beyond engagement scores
This has direct consequences for how HR makes the case for investment.
While 66 per cent of UK HR leaders say financial evidence drives sign-off on benefits spend, 44 per cent say their greatest pressure is demonstrating clear ROI.
If employees aren’t noticing what’s been put in place, there is no ROI story to tell.
The vicious cycle is clear: employers invest, employees don’t notice, HR struggles to prove value, investment comes under pressure, employees feel less supported. And so it continues.
If you fix the friction you will improve employee experience and make the case for every pound already being spent.
Benefits that employees can’t find or connect to their own lives may as well not exist. But benefits that are easy to access and genuinely relevant have a real impact on individuals, teams and the organisations investing in them.
Actionable insights
- Remove friction from the benefits journey. Create a single destination where everything is visible, searchable and explained in plain language. You want to give instant access to supporting information like leave balances and policy documents. If someone has to leave the platform to find context – or even click one too many times – the design has already failed.
- Measure what’s felt, not just what’s offered. Uptake data doesn’t tell you everything. Build in insight on whether employees are actually experiencing a difference. In their financial resilience, their health and their sense of being valued.
- Use technology to make existing investment work harder. Before asking for more budget, ask whether current provision is as accessible as it could be. A smarter technology layer can transform the reach and impact of what’s already there, without a single additional benefit being added.
Read another article by Gethin Nadin: What the OECD reveals about a world moving beyond pay secrecy
