The Towergate research reveals that only 39% of employers believe their employees fully understand the benefits provided. This underscores a persistent challenge in the current benefits landscape: ensuring employees not only have access to offerings but also truly comprehend and engage with them.
Why Does Benefits Understanding Remain Elusive?
Despite increasingly comprehensive benefits offerings—including private medical insurance, wellbeing programs, and financial protections—a significant gap remains between availability and employee understanding.
The study highlights that while 62% of employers have increased the frequency of health and well-being communications, 43% struggle to effectively target these messages to different workforce segments. This points to a key leadership insight: quality and precision in communication outweigh quantity. Therefore, communicating benefits through blanket messaging will lead to employee disengagement and diluted impact.
An Eppione Tip: Leverage data segmentation in your HR or benefits platform to tailor messaging by employee demographics, role, or lifecycle stage. Personalization drives employee attention and meaningful engagement far more than mass communication. Download our eBook on how to utilize people analytics for strategic decision-making.
The Role of Hybrid Working: A Communication Challenge or an Opportunity?
With 38% of employers finding benefits communication harder since hybrid working became widespread, traditional office-centric information sharing is clearly insufficient. But can this shift also be a catalyst for innovation? By embracing digital platforms, like Eppione, organizations can meet employees where they are, anytime and anywhere. In fact, 55% of employers say they now concentrate more on digital health and wellbeing communications.
Digital benefits platforms not only consolidate information but also empower employees to make informed, personalized choices aligned with their life stage and priorities. The challenge lies in seamlessly integrating these platforms into wider HR strategies, ensuring they are intuitive, engaging, and connected to employee experiences.
An Eppione Tip: Invest in a benefits-specific platform that offers mobile access and a seamless user experience. Ensure it integrates with communications channels such as email and intranet, and trigger personalized nudges based on usage patterns or employee lifecycle events. If you’ve got it, flaunt it – see how Eppione clearly communicates your benefits to employees.
Employee Benefits: A Strategic Business Imperative
Beyond the obvious advantages to employees, well-communicated and well-understood benefits directly contribute to broader organizational goals: attracting and retaining talent, boosting productivity, and fostering a culture of well-being. Leaders must ask themselves: Are benefits programs truly integrated into the employee lifecycle and organizational culture? Or are they still seen as transactional perks?
Debra Clark, Head of Wellbeing at Towergate Employee Benefits, puts it succinctly in the report: “If employees do not know about, and understand the benefits on offer, then they will not make use of them, and the employers will not receive the value for the business.” This statement should serve as a reminder for executives and HR professionals alike.
An Eppione Tip: Position employee benefits as a core pillar of your employer brand and talent strategy. Incorporate benefits education into onboarding, career development, and regular wellbeing initiatives, ensuring ongoing reinforcement rather than one-off communication bursts.
Empowering Benefits Communication and Engagement
At Eppione, we recognize that closing the employee understanding gap requires more than just technology—it demands a strategic approach combining data-driven segmentation, personalized messaging, and accessible benefits navigation. Our platform is designed to simplify this complexity by aggregating benefits in a single, user-friendly interface where employees can explore their options, compare offerings, and receive tailored recommendations.
By delivering benefits content contextually through multiple channels like mobile, desktop, and even reminders aligned with life events, employers can dramatically enhance awareness and utilization rates. The result is a beneficial experience that is truly employee-centric and aligned with organizational objectives.
The employee benefits landscape is at a crossroads. With the expansion of benefits options and the rise of hybrid work models, organizations must rethink how they communicate and engage. Leaders who prioritize clarity, relevance, and accessibility in benefits communication will unlock tremendous value—for their people and their business.
Book a free consultation to benchmark your employee benefits strategy and discover how Eppione’s benefits management platform is designed to enhance employee understanding, streamline total rewards management, and clearly demonstrate the ROI of your rewards programs.
