4 practical tips to analyse and collect employee feedback
Nowadays, with high employee demand and budget pressures abound, you must demonstrate you are doing employee benefits well.
Yet most HR and reward professionals struggle to prove the value of their benefits programmes.
The 2025 Benefits Design Research from Howden and REBA highlights how significant the issue is. Alarmingly, a third of benefits proposals are rejected by leaders due to insufficient data to support the case for change.
The research amongst 360 reward and benefits professionals representing nearly two million employees, reveals a clear gap in how organisations collect and use benefits data. Many lack tools, skills, or partners to gather meaningful insights and build evidence-based cases for change.
Without improvement, the trend will continue. More than 80% are concerned future initiatives would be blocked, not because the ideas lack merit, but because the data to justify them simply is not there.
All this means the nature of the reward role and skillset needs to change.
Over-reliance on benchmarking
When it comes to collecting and analysing employee feedback the research is also clear. There’s an over-reliance on benchmarking to guide benefits decisions, especially in pensions, where 85% use competitor comparisons to support proposals.
Far fewer reward teams use metrics that reflect the employee experience, such as member outcomes or employee feedback.
This means organisations don’t have a complete picture to make well-informed decisions. Missing employee feedback is missing the most important ingredient for decision-making – what are the needs and expectations of your people?
Even better still, correlating employee feedback with competitor insights can really identify your benefits gaps.
Practical tips for analysing and collecting employee feedback
Organisations don’t necessarily need to overhaul their benefits to improve outcomes — but they do need to be intentional about gathering and using data for decision-making.
1. Build structured, cyclical employee feedback
Best practice involves building employee feedback into the business. This should include:
- A detailed benefits survey every 3-5 years to deeply understand what employees expect and how you are doing against those expectations.
- Shorter pulse surveys when benefit changes are considered or rolled out, to inform decision-making.
- Aligning to broader people or culture surveys – including targeted, meaningful questions on benefits that can be correlated with feedback on the wider business.
These surveys must be well-designed, unbiased, and brave to ask tough questions such as which benefits they would trade off for a pay rise – to provide critical insights into which benefits are really valued.
2. Combine surveys with focus groups
Surveys are more valuable for gathering employee feedback. Firstly, you can typically get a critical mass of responses to be statistically significant and represent the whole business, and everyone’s feedback is given equal weighting.
They can be complemented by:
- Structured focus groups facilitated by an expert to capture diverse views — not just those of the loudest voices.
- Engagement with Employee Representative Groups (ERGs) to validate survey findings and gather grassroots feedback.
Having the right sequence – survey first, followed by targeted focus groups – creates a structured framework for understanding employees’ views.
Employees will also trust the feedback is being acted upon. So, consider surveys and focus groups to get to the heart of the matter.
3. Ask the right questions
To gain truly meaningful insights, organisations need robust, well-designed questions that avoid leading language and uncover the reality of employee experiences.
Questions should cover the fundamental building blocks of all benefits programmes:
- Funding: How competitive and well-funded are the benefits? Do they meet expectations?
- Choice: Do employees have sufficient choice in the benefits available to suit their needs and lifestyle? Do they add value and solve employee problems?
- Experience: How easy and positive is the experience of accessing and using benefits?
Also, correlating questions to understand the relationship between expectations and reality is important. It enables you to discover what people value most and if you are meeting their priorities.
These new insights will lead to programme success and eliminate waste.
4. Take a holistic and balanced approach
Employee feedback is crucial, but is only part of a balanced governance framework that considers:
- Take up rates and utilisation data of different benefits – people can tell you what they want, but if their actions don't back up their needs, don’t rely on it.
- Health and absence trends – employees may ask for one thing, but the business needs to see ROI and if certain interventions create better performance outcomes, focus on them.
- External benchmarking — used appropriately as one of several data points, not the only one.
Ensure employee feedback is weighted appropriately, rather than overshadowed by competitive comparisons.
Too often, organisations fall into the trap of designing benefits programmes based on what competitors offer, not what employees truly need and value. In a climate where employee attraction, retention and wellbeing are critical, that approach simply isn’t good enough.
Gathering high-quality, structured employee feedback – alongside benchmarking and utilisation data – is the only way to build benefits strategies that deliver value for employees and the organisation.
Getting this right means organisations will see fewer rejected proposals and create benefits programmes that are relevant, competitive, and valuable – strengthening their EVP and business performance.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Howden Employee Benefits
Howden provides insurance broking, risk management and claims consulting services, globally. We work with clients of all sizes to provide dedicated employee benefits & wellbeing consultancy.
