Why so many employees don’t understand their benefits, and what employers can do about it
Here’s a finding that makes uncomfortable reading for anyone responsible for a benefits package. When Brown and Brown Health and Employee Benefits surveyed 626 HR and finance professionals for the Employee Benefits Benchmarking Report in April 2026, 91% of employers said they believed staff understood the benefits on offer. Drewberry asked employees and got a rather different answer. Just 36% said they fully understood what their employer provides, and only 11% could remember receiving any regular communication about their benefits.
Somewhere between those two numbers, a lot of money is going to waste. Pensions, life cover, income protection, wellbeing support. All of it costs real money to provide, and an employee who doesn’t know what they have gets no value from any of it. Neither does the employer paying for it.
Where the money leaks out
Salary sacrifice is probably the clearest example. The benchmarking report found that nearly 40% of employers still don’t use salary sacrifice for workplace pension contributions, despite the National Insurance savings it produces for employer and employee alike. Some of that will be a considered decision. Much of it won’t be. The arrangement tends to be poorly understood on both sides, and plenty of employees who do have access to it assume that giving up salary must leave them worse off, when usually the opposite is true.
Retirement saving shows the same pattern. Drewberry’s workplace pension research found that over 57% of employees have no idea how much they need to save for retirement. Automatic enrolment brought millions of people into pension saving, and completing your declaration of compliance gets the scheme legally up and running. It doesn’t teach anyone what tax relief is, though, or what their contributions might actually amount to by retirement.
Part of the explanation lies in how benefits get communicated. Email is still the main channel, used by 57% of employers, usually backed up by the staff handbook. Nothing wrong with either, but a message sent once at enrolment is unlikely to change what someone does with their pension five years later.
The topics that cause the most confusion
Ask employees what baffles them about money at work and the same subjects keep appearing. The workplace pension itself, for a start. Many people know they have one and that’s about the extent of it. Pension tax relief is another, which is a shame because the government topping up your contributions is one of the best reasons to save more, yet huge numbers of people have never heard of it. The State Pension generates endless wrong assumptions about what it pays and when. Beyond pensions there’s protection, meaning things like life cover and income protection that staff often don’t realise they have until somebody in the office becomes seriously ill, plus the unglamorous basics of budgeting and emergency savings.
None of this is obscure knowledge. It just never gets explained.
You don’t need to be a financial adviser to explain it
A worry that comes up often with smaller firms is that talking to staff about money risks straying into regulated financial advice. The line is easier to stay on the right side of than people fear. Explaining how pension tax relief works, or what happens to someone’s pay under salary sacrifice, is education. Telling a particular individual what to do with their savings is advice, and that part belongs with an authorised adviser. No FCA permission is needed to help your staff understand benefits they already have. If anything, employees who grasp the basics get far more out of professional guidance when they eventually seek it.
Keep it short or nobody finishes it
The traditional answer was the pension seminar. An adviser comes in, books a meeting room for two hours, and the people who most need the information are out on a job, stuck with a client, or quietly dreading the whole thing. Short online modules get round most of this. Ten minutes on a single topic, on a phone if that’s what’s to hand, finished in a quiet moment and picked up again later. Completion can also be tracked, which gives HR something concrete to report rather than a vague sense that wellbeing has been supported.
Three questions to ask any provider
If you’re weighing up financial wellbeing education for your workforce, three questions will tell you most of what you need to know.
- Does the content cover what your staff actually ask about? Pensions, tax relief, salary sacrifice and the State Pension should be at the heart of it, not bolted on.
- Can a busy employee genuinely finish a module in one sitting? If not, your completion rates will let you know soon enough.
- Is the provider clear about the line between education and regulated advice? The good ones design their content around it.
Where Aspina fits
Closing that understanding gap is the whole reason Aspina exists. The platform delivers short e-learning modules on the financial topics UK employees most often misunderstand, built for SMEs and HR teams who want staff to make proper use of the benefits already being paid for. If the research above sounds uncomfortably familiar, get in touch and we’ll show you how it works.