How BT is making benefits work for a workforce of 100,000+

When two thirds of your workforce never sit at a desk, how do you make sure they feel the real value of what you’re offering? That was one of the central questions explored at Benifex Energise 2026, where Michelle Jones, Senior Total Reward Experience & Risk Management Specialist at BT joined us for an honest conversation about the challenges, and wins, of delivering benefits at scale.

Meeting employees where they are

BT is a large and complex organization, with engineers out on the road, staff in retail stores and contact center employees. About 30% of the workforce is desk-based, 40% is field-based, and around 25% work in contact centers and in retail — meaning the majority are difficult to reach through traditional desk-based communication.

Rather than waiting for employees to come to them, BT’s benefits team took a different approach: getting out in front of people.

As Michelle explains: “We’ve spent the day out in the vans with engineers, joined their manager meetings, gone along to stores and watched how those employees are interacting with our customers — just to really understand what complexities there are and what touch points we potentially have available.”

Rethinking how benefits are categorized

One of BT’s most impactful changes came not from introducing new benefits, but from reorganizing the ones they already had. After listening to employees who said they found it hard to understand when they could enroll in different benefits, the team scrapped category names like “financial fitness” and “future fitness” — and replaced them with something far more practical: when can you make changes?

Benefits are now grouped into three categories: core benefits (always available), annual only benefits (new hires or the annual window), and anytime benefits (change whenever you like). The result was a clearer story for employees and a simple message for managers to pass on: “If you do nothing else during the benefits window, log on and check your annual only benefits — those are the ones you can’t change later.”

Supporting financial wellbeing in real terms

With many BT employees close to the national minimum wage, financial wellbeing is not an abstract concept. During the gap between the early December payroll and the January payroll, BT was hearing directly from employees and managers that people genuinely couldn’t afford to get to work.

BT ran a pay advance trial with around 12,000 employees, offering up to £150 to be repaid over February and March. Around 50% of those eligible took it up — and the majority took the full amount. The results prompted BT to look at a longer-term solution, including a potential workplace savings product that could pick up where the loans proposition leaves off, helping employees build financial resilience over time.

Making comms more relatable

For this year’s benefits renewal, BT experimented with a persona-based approach to communications, moving away from generic “your benefits window is open” messaging. Using AI to help brainstorm, the team landed on four key personas that most employees could recognize themselves in — the fitness fanatic, the financial optimizer, the global traveler, and a fourth covering family and lifestyle. Each persona came with a set of benefits most relevant to that type of person, making it easier for employees to see what was actually in it for them.

Michelle states: “The look and feel of the benefits website really looks much more modern, much more updated — we’ve also enjoyed how much we’ve been able to customize that homepage.”

The postcards were also deliberately designed to be evergreen, with no mention of specific window dates, so materials left up in a contact center or on a notice board months later would still be useful.

What’s next

Looking ahead, BT’s focus is on financial resilience, total reward transparency, and employee storytelling. After their last benefits renewal, around 25% of employees who completed a survey said they’d be happy to share a testimonial about a benefit that had made a difference to them — a much higher number than expected, and a signal that employees want to talk. The challenge now is finding the capacity to capture those stories and share them in a way that reaches the people who need to hear them most.

If you want to see the recorded version of the session, find it here!