Are your perks and benefits backfiring? How to get your employees to use their benefits

You know the situation. Your company provides a wide range of employee perks and benefits. And maybe you regularly send out emails letting everyone know what’s on offer.

But when you check for uptake, you find that only a fraction of the workforce uses the benefits you offer. Meanwhile, you’re facing retainment and talent acquisition challenges and wonder why other companies’ benefits strategies attract so many new employees through their doors.

Why do benefits go unused?

There are many reasons, and we’ll look at them all, but first and foremost, consider this: are you actually offering things your workforce wants and needs?

You might answer, “Of course! We’ve got this great thing and that wonderful opportunity.” But who decided they were great and wonderful?

Perks employers offer vs. perks employees want

Let us paint you a picture. Meet Bob, a 55-year-old HR director.

Now Bob was in charge of designing his employee benefits package and gave it much thought. He asked himself, what would I find useful and valuable if I were one of our hard-working team members? And Bob was very sincere and really did try to choose what he thought the employees would like.

Maybe he was one of the hundreds of HR professionals we surveyed at Lumina. 95% of them said they’d differentiated their benefits offering to try to reach the needs of different talent segments.

The problem is, after that hard work, only 66% of those HR professionals said their own benefits package was relevant to them personally. And that’s the people designing the benefits packages. We can only imagine that this figure is far lower for employees of other backgrounds and generations.

Bob’s employees are much younger than him. Most are in their late twenties, early thirties and at a very different stage of life where financial and family commitments are concerned. Because of generational differences, their cultural views and priorities are distinct from Bob’s too.

Bob’s choice of benefits simply does not reflect what his workforce cares about. To put this right, Bob needs to spend more time listening to the employees. He needs to understand what they are worried about and where their passions and values lie.

When do employee perks become obsolete?

Benefits are representative of a moment in time, and changes in employee values can make a benefit obsolete – along with changing circumstances.

Poor Bob heard that some firms had beer fridges for after-work parties. Deciding this could build team spirit, he got one too and even bought a company pool table, but no one showed up. What happened?

Maybe he didn’t realise there were other tensions at play. An after-hours activity is only fun for employees if they and their colleagues are happy. If the team morale is flagging and relationships are frayed, staying after hours, even for a party, might simply eat into a worker’s free time.

Bob’s heart was in the right place, but maybe he didn’t read the room and notice that other priorities needed to be met first.

Similarly, what may have appeared a great perk when Bob was in his twenties can be viewed very differently now. Take private medical insurance, for example. While some people value it, there are significant numbers of younger workers who regard it as elitist and something that undermines the NHS.

Lost in the employee benefits basement

Let’s say Bob got his act together, consulted the workforce and now has a range of perks and benefits he knows they will value. But for some reason, employees are still not using their benefits.

What gives? Bob sent so many emails… and that newsletter… and there’s links in the special folder he created on the company’s cloud system…

You may have the best employee benefits package out there, but if employees don’t know what they are or how to access them, they may as well not exist.

Just because they’re mentioned during staff inductions or highlighted in company communications, don’t assume your staff will remember or recognise the value of the wide variety of additional benefits you’ve just told them about.

Getting employee benefits right can be a challenge, but making your people aware of what’s on offer can be an even greater conundrum. Unless that is, you step into the 21st century, and think digitally. There’s a lot to be said for employee benefits platforms where all the perks are in one place, easy to access and take up.

Don’t be like Bob. Make benefits what they should be: a powerful way to improve your employees’ lives, retain talent, and build an attractive employer brand.

To learn more, check out our thoughts on value-based employee perks or how smaller businesses can compete with competitor salaries.