Stop designing benefits for someone who doesn’t exist
There’s no such thing as the average employee and no two employees are the same.
Your workforce might include someone married and someone single, a homeowner and someone house-sharing, parents, carers and people just trying to make it through the month. It may include someone who’s 27 and not thinking about pension yet and someone who’s 54 and thinking about little else. Yet most benefits packages are quietly built around a middle ground, a blended average that represents no individual particularly well and some not at all. The data shows it.
Today’s workforce spans five generations, dozens of life stages and wildly different financial circumstances, all being offered the same package.
Those differences are sharpening. According to research from Epassi, 72% of employees say the cost-of-living crisis has changed their outlook on what matters in a job. That’s not a fringe concern, nearly three-quarters of your workforce actively reprioritising what they need from their employer, right now.
The one-size-fits-all approach has gone and most benefits packages haven’t kept up. Employers tend to lead on hybrid working, maternity and paternity support and private medical insurance.
Employees consistently say they want better pension contributions, flexible time off and financial wellbeing support. When the package doesn’t match the need, employees quietly disengage.
Three employees. Same package. All underserved
Here’s an example that brings the problem to life.
- Sarah is 29 and has recently had her first child, she’s financially stretched and needs flexible working and financial wellbeing tools.
- Marcus is 52, is increasingly health-conscious and wants pension guidance and a health screening.
- Priya is 34, quietly struggling with stress and burnout and needs real mental health support, not a link to a helpline.
All three work for the same organisation on the same benefits package. None of them feel their benefits were designed with them in mind, because it wasn’t. This is the one-size-fits problem, and it shows up in the numbers.
Six out of ten (63%) employees say they would leave their current role if another company offered a better benefits package and among Gen Z workers that rises to 71%. These aren’t people who don’t value benefits, they’re people who haven’t found a package that fits their life.
The fix is better insight
The temptation when uptake is low is to add more to the menu. More perks, more choice, more spend. But quantity isn’t the issue. Relevance is.
Moving to a data-driven approach means analysing your benefits by workforce segment – age, life stage, salary band, location, working pattern, to understand who is engaging with what and crucially who isn’t.
A benefit with 60% uptake looks like a win until you discover the 40% not using it are your youngest employees, or your most financially stressed, or the group you were most trying to support.
That level of insight only comes from asking the right questions and collecting the right data. Platforms like Zest make this possible, giving HR teams real-time visibility of uptake by segment so patterns that would otherwise stay hidden become impossible to ignore.
With real-time visibility of uptake you can design benefits that reflect your actual workforce, communicating them in a way that feels personal rather than generic. It becomes possible to demonstrate to your leadership team, with evidence, that the investment is working.
Just over half (56%) of employees say the quality of their benefits package has a direct impact on their morale at work. That’s a number worth taking seriously. It starts with stopping the search for the average employee and starting to listen to the actual ones.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Epassi UK
Creating a fitter, happier and more productive workforce now, and for future generations.
