Why most organisations get benefit renewals wrong
Most benefits renewals are not strategy. They are maintenance.
It's the beginning of autumn, which means January renewals are already in motion. You know how the next few months go: the market review arrives, the benchmarking data comes out, someone notes a few things competitors have added since last year, the budget gets trimmed again, and the package comes out the other side with one new provider bolted on, but more or less the same.
Renewals are done. But let’s ask the harder question this year: has this moved the needle on why someone would join you rather than your competitor? Usually not.
Renewals are commonly run as a procurement job before expecting a strategic outcome. Those are different tasks. Procurement asks what this costs and whether it still stacks up against the market. Strategy asks what we are offering that nobody else is. Only one of those questions gets asked in the average renewal meeting, and it is not the second one.
It matters because an EVP is a trade. Your people give you effort, attention and years of their working life. You give them something in return that they value and cannot easily get elsewhere. That last part is where most packages quietly fall down.
I speak to HR, reward and benefits leaders every week, and benefits sit at the heart of almost every EVP plan I hear about. Rightly so, but the plans have started to become a copy and paste exercise.
Someone walks me through their package and they are proud of it. Preventive wellbeing, financial support, menopause and fertility provision, flexible working, a few extras at senior grades. Strong. But then the next conversation describes something almost identical. Then the one after that.
That is not a failure of effort or ambition. It is the process working exactly as designed. If every employer studies the same reports, watches the same peer group and acts on the same survey findings, they will all arrive at roughly the same answer. Aim for the median and you land on the median. But that’s arithmetic, not strategy.
How to win your 2027 renewals period
Try this: instead of the usual market comparison, pull up your closest competitor’s benefits list. How many benefits differ from your own? Odds are the answer is a low number.
Fixing that starts by changing the question the renewal is built around. Not "is this still competitive and good value?" but "where is the biggest distance between what our people say matters to them and what they can actually access?" Whatever sits in that gap is the only part of your package capable of making someone choose you.
Why dental is a differentiator in 2027
Dental is sitting in that gap right now.
Nearly nine out of ten (87%) of employees say dental is essential or a differentiator in a benefits package, which is a striking number for a category that has stood still for a decade. Most people are still relying on NHS access that has effectively collapsed for working age adults, or a cash plan that pays money back once the damage is done. Reimbursement is welcome. It does nothing for someone who cannot get seen in the first place.
Employees want it. Employers need fewer dental-related absences and less presenteeism. Both sides of the trade are already there, and hardly anyone has joined them up. That is rare, and it will not stay rare, because everything uncommon eventually becomes the going rate.
So the question worth carrying into your renewal is not whether your benefits package is good. It almost certainly is. It is whether anyone outside your organisation could tell it apart from the next one.
If they could not, you have found your starting point.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Toothfairy
The world’s first on-demand dental benefit. Save time, cut costs, protect employees.
