The benefits discoverability gap

Employers are spending more on benefits than ever before. Yet many are still asking the same question: why don’t employees seem to value what we’re providing?

The answer isn’t always that benefits need to be redesigned or expanded. More often, the issue is much simpler: employees can’t find what they need when they need it.

Our latest global research highlights the scale of the challenge. While 64% of employers told us they had expanded their benefits offering over the last year, only 32% of employees felt their benefits had improved. Half believed nothing had changed at all. While some of that increased investment is undoubtedly driven by rising costs, particularly in healthcare, the gap between employer investment and employee perception is too significant to ignore.

It’s tempting to interpret this as a problem of spend. In reality, it’s increasingly a problem of delivery.

Most employees experience benefits through a fragmented collection of systems, portals, provider websites, and policy documents. Even organizations with excellent benefits programs can struggle to create a coherent experience when information is spread across so many different places. Employees are expected to remember what support is available, navigate complex systems, and find relevant information at exactly the moment they need it most.

The reality is that people don’t engage with benefits in a structured way: they engage with them when something happens in their lives. A new child arrives. A parent becomes ill. Financial pressure starts to build. A health concern emerges unexpectedly.

Those are the moments when benefits become valuable. Yet they’re also the moments when employees are least likely to have the time, capacity, or knowledge to navigate a maze of information. When someone is dealing with a challenging life event, they aren’t necessarily thinking about which portal contains the answer. They’re simply looking for support.

That’s why I believe discoverability is becoming one of the most important issues in benefits strategy. For years, we’ve focused on measuring enrollment rates, participation levels, and program uptake. Those metrics remain important, but they only tell us what employees selected at a particular point in time. They don’t tell us whether someone found the support they needed during a difficult moment six months later.

The real test of a benefits strategy is whether employees can easily access the right support when life happens. This is where recent advances in technology become genuinely interesting. Not because they create new benefits, but because they create new ways of connecting employees to the benefits they already have.

Historically, search has relied on employees knowing exactly what they’re looking for. However, that’s a difficult assumption to make. To take a simple example, benefits may be described in different ways or embedded as multiple parts of a single benefit plan. Someone dealing with a serious health issue affecting a dependent may start by asking about medical coverage, but that may only be one part of the support available to them. There may also be access to an Employee Assistance Program, specialist clinical pathways, dependent leave policies, financial wellbeing resources, or other forms of support that could make a meaningful difference.

What’s changing, powered through the capabilities inherent within AI, is the ability to understand context rather than simply respond to keywords. Instead of returning another list of documents, technology is becoming better at helping employees understand the broader range of support that may be relevant to their situation. In many ways, that’s less about technology and more about creating a more human experience. It’s about helping employees discover support they may not have known existed rather than expecting them to know exactly what questions to ask.

The same principle applies to personalization. Our research shows that employees want help understanding what’s relevant to them. What they don’t want is technology making decisions on their behalf. The distinction matters: people value guidance, but they still want control.

They want guidance that helps them navigate what’s available and decide what’s right for them. The best experiences provide relevant information and useful context without steering employees toward a particular outcome. They help people understand the support available and how it relates to their own circumstances, while leaving the final decision firmly in their hands.

When that balance is right, personalization feels genuinely valuable. When it’s not, recommendations can feel irrelevant, overly prescriptive, or disconnected from what employees actually need.

Trust is central to that relationship. Employees need confidence that any personal information being used is there to improve their experience rather than monitor their behavior. In practice, that means being transparent about what information is being used, why it’s being used, and how it benefits the employee.

For employers looking to improve how employees access and engage with benefits, the starting point is often less glamorous than people expect. Before thinking about sophisticated capabilities, organizations need to think about the foundations. Bringing together fragmented benefits information, creating a single source of truth, and improving the overall employee experience often delivers more value than introducing new tools in isolation.

In fact, one of the biggest mistakes I see organizations make is assuming technology can solve an experience problem on its own. It can’t. If the underlying experience is fragmented, adding more technology simply makes that fragmentation more sophisticated.

Looking ahead, I expect discoverability to become a defining feature of great benefits experiences. Employees will increasingly expect support to be available in the flow of their day-to-day work rather than hidden behind annual enrollment windows or buried within separate systems. Employers don’t have a benefits problem as much as a discoverability problem. The value is already there; the challenge is helping employees access it.

How wide is the gap between what employers offer and what employees actually experience?

The Energizing Reward and Benefits report brings together perspectives from thousands of employees and HR leaders to uncover what’s driving engagement, trust, and perceived value in today’s benefits landscape.

Download the report to explore the latest research and benchmark your strategy against global trends.

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