When Employers Invest in Benefits That Employees Don’t Understand
There is a particular frustration that anyone working in HR will recognise. You spend months negotiating a pension scheme, an EAP, income protection cover. You send the welcome email. You put it all on the intranet. And then six months later you run a survey and half your staff think their pension is just “something that happens automatically.”
That gap, between what an employer provides and what an employee actually understands, is where a lot of wellbeing investment quietly disappears.
Financial Stress Is Already in the Room
Before getting to the awareness problem, it helps to understand what employers are actually dealing with. The Zellis Financial Wellbeing Report 2025, which surveyed 2,500 employees and 500 business leaders across the UK and Ireland, found that 92% of employees had experienced financial stress in the past year. Among those, 89% said their working lives had suffered as a result.
These are not marginal figures.
Champion Health’s 2024 Workplace Health Report identified financial pressure as the biggest external stressor affecting employees, ahead of workload and job security, with 41% of the workforce reporting it as a significant concern. Mind’s Big Mental Health Report 2024 found that 52% of employees said money worries had made their performance at work worse, and 45% said they were losing sleep over it.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research, as reported by employee engagement specialists Stribe, puts a cost on all of this: 4.2 million working days are lost in the UK each year directly attributable to poor financial wellbeing, representing £626 million in lost output.
Financial stress does not stay at home. It sits in meetings, it stands at the production line, it answers the phones.
Most Employees Don’t Know What Their Employer Already Offers
This is where things get interesting, because it is also where there is genuine cause for optimism.
Fidelity International’s Global Sentiment Survey gathered responses from more than 38,000 working adults across 35 countries, including 1,000 in the UK. It found that 43% of UK employees do not know the full range of benefits available to them through their employer. Only 57% had a clear picture of what was on offer.
For organisations that have invested real money in their benefits packages, that is a sobering number. The same research showed a direct link with satisfaction: employees who understood their benefits were considerably more satisfied at work than those who did not, or those who were unsure what they had access to.
The problem is not always the benefits themselves. Often it is the absence of any structured effort to help people actually understand them.
Pensions Are a Particular Problem
Workplace pensions are a useful illustration. Most UK employees are enrolled in one. Many have been contributing for years. And yet research published by Aviva in April 2025 found that 16% of people do not know what a workplace pension is. More than half (57%) did not know the government adds to pension savings through tax relief. And 55% had no idea how their pension was actually being invested.
This was not confined to younger employees or those new to the workforce. The uncertainty was spread across all age groups, including people within a few years of retirement.
Offering a good pension scheme is one thing. Employees understanding it well enough to benefit from it is quite another.
Sending Information Is Not the Same as Building Understanding
Most HR teams do communicate benefits. There is usually an onboarding pack, an intranet page, perhaps an annual reminder around open enrolment. The difficulty is that this kind of one-off information delivery tends to assume a level of engagement and prior knowledge that many employees simply do not have.
Financial topics can feel intimidating. People who are already anxious about money are often the last to seek out additional information, and the first to disengage from anything that feels technical. Sending a PDF rarely changes that.
What tends to work better is a structured, progressive approach: content that starts with the basics, that people can return to when their circumstances change, and that is written for a general audience rather than a compliance team. The goal is not to produce financial experts. It is to give employees enough understanding to make sensible decisions about the resources that are already there for them.
Online learning suits this well. People can work through material at their own pace, revisit something they found confusing, and do it without having to ask what might feel like an embarrassing question in a group setting.
People Are Not All in the Same Financial Place
A member of staff in their first job has entirely different priorities from someone in their forties trying to work out whether they are on track for retirement. Both of them are in a different position from a colleague approaching 60 and thinking about whether they can afford to wind down their hours.
Financial education that treats all employees as interchangeable tends to feel irrelevant to most of them. People engage with content that speaks to where they actually are, not to a hypothetical average employee somewhere in the middle of their career.
Modular, structured education can address this. It can be built to serve different needs without requiring a bespoke programme for every individual, and it gives employees the flexibility to focus on what is most relevant to them at any given point.
The Commercial Case Is Straightforward
The Zellis report found that 78% of employees said they contribute more to their organisation when they feel financially confident. Reduce stress, improve understanding, and people tend to show up with more focus and more commitment.
In a labour market where retention is a persistent challenge, and where employees are increasingly open about what they expect from employers, visible financial wellbeing support also sends a signal. It tells people that the organisation sees them as more than a pair of hands.
For smaller businesses, none of this needs to be complicated or expensive. A reasonable starting point is simply asking: do our employees know what we offer, and do they actually understand it? A short survey will usually provide a clear answer.
From there, the practical questions are not that difficult. How are benefits currently communicated? Where is understanding weakest? And is there a structured way to address that, rather than hoping people will find the information themselves? The ambition does not need to be wholesale transformation. Even modest improvements in how well people understand what is available to them can make a real difference.
How Aspina Can Help
Aspina is developing structured online learning resources to help employees understand financial wellbeing topics, from workplace pensions and tax relief through to budgeting and longer-term planning.
The materials are designed to be accessible to people with no financial background, and practical enough to be useful to those who do have some. If you are thinking about how your organisation approaches financial education for employees, we would be glad to have a conversation.