Benefits Communications is Broken. Here's What Global Enterprise Leaders are Doing About It.

Benefits Communications is Broken. Here's What Global Enterprise Leaders are Doing About It.

At Ben's Q2 Product Innovation Forum — a closed-room conversation with senior Reward and Benefits practitioners — we tackled what's broken in benefits communications, and what's next.

Benefits 101

Table of contents

"Until it's relevant, you block it all out"

There's a version of benefits communications that looks fine on paper. The email goes out. The open rate is reasonable. The benefit is technically available. Job done.

The problem is that benefits aren't like other communications. A mental health coaching app, a fertility benefit, a compassionate leave policy — these things only become important to someone at a specific moment in their life. And that moment rarely coincides with the quarterly wellbeing newsletter.

One leader put it directly: "Until those things are relevant for you, you just block it all out. And then when you find out it's three months too late."

Another described something harder to fix: "I don't think anyone's going to come into work and type 'miscarriage' into their intranet site... We spend all that money on those benefits — and the person who actually needs it has zero knowledge or awareness."

The gap between ambition and infrastructure

When the room was asked who felt confident in their marketing skills, a few hands went up — cautiously.

One attendee described the problem clearly: "Marketing is not only communications — it's also... do I really look thoroughly through the data to measure the impact of what I've done?"

Leaders weren't struggling with ambition, they were struggling with infrastructure.

A marketer in the room

The forum introduced Lauren Smith, Ben's senior email marketing manager, who shared how lifecycle marketing works and why the same principles can apply to benefits communication.

Her starting point: every campaign follows the same logic. Define the outcome. Pick the audience. Choose the channel and timing. Write the content. Measure what worked.

Marketing is about relevancy, she emphasized. The execution is where benefits teams consistently fall down.

Finding the right channels for your audience

The consensus was that email still has a place, but Slack and Teams have higher open rates, though they come with their own chaos.

"One bad experience from one employee can get back to your CPO and you're spending days trying to explain the situation."

Taking care with signal-based targeting

There was a discussion about signal-based targeting, emphasizing the need for careful language. One leader noted, "It's less about the audience and more about the messaging."

Where the right technology can help

The product demo centred on a campaign for a mental health coaching benefit, showing how technology can help identify and target the right audiences effectively.

The bigger picture

The takeaway was that Reward and Benefits teams need to operate like a marketing function to effectively reach employees who need specific benefits. The infrastructure to do something about it is changing, allowing for targeted communication without additional workload.

Hear from those who attended on the day:

John Whitaker (Workday) on his experience at Ben's Product Innovation Forum - YouTube

John Whitaker (Workday) on his experience

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