How companies can increase awareness and impact of their employee benefits packages

Companies today invest significantly in employee benefits to attract and retain talent. Despite these substantial investments, employees often fail to fully utilize these benefits. HR teams spend up to 20% of their time organizing and communicating about employee benefits, but many companies still see low adoption rates among employees, with activation rates ranging from only 5% to 25%. In addition, a large portion of available personal budgets often goes unused.

In this blog, we’ll explain how to increase the visibility of your employee benefits package and maximize its impact.

Step-by-step: Increasing awareness and impact of your benefits

1. Optimize your communication plan
   Improve how you communicate about employee benefits by utilizing multiple channels. Additionally, make this a core part of the onboarding process. While new employees will learn their day-to-day tasks from senior colleagues or managers, HR’s responsibility is to show them how the company invests in them through the benefits on offer.

2. Use testimonials and success stories
   By sharing success stories from other colleagues, you can highlight the positive impact of the employee benefits. Personal stories about how certain benefits have contributed to the well-being and growth of employees make these benefits more relevant and tangible for others.

3. Ensure alignment between different benefits
   Ensure that the offered benefits complement each other and form a holistic package. Financial planning support is a great example: it provides employees with financial insights and assists with questions about pensions, buying a home, or cohabitation. Financial reviews are valuable at every career stage, reducing absenteeism and stress while boosting productivity. They also help employees make the most of other benefits, as an expert can point out which advantages they can—or should—utilize.

4. Leverage data
   Data is essential to understanding which benefits are well-used and which are underutilized. Regular evaluations of benefit usage help HR teams make informed decisions about adjusting or enhancing the benefits package.

Conclusion

By strategically communicating, sharing success stories, ensuring alignment between benefits, and using data to inform decisions, companies can significantly improve the adoption and impact of their employee benefits. Increased usage of these benefits leads not only to higher employee satisfaction but also to better overall business outcomes.