Employers invest heavily in benefits but if the story doesn’t land with employees the spend is wasted. Reward teams need to adopt the skills of great marketers to make benefits resonate, argues Neil Mullarkey, communications expert and author.
Ask a group of employees what benefits their company offers and it’s likely you’ll initially be met by silence. Then come the guesses: “gym discount?”, “something with bikes?” “I think there’s an EAP but no one uses it.”
That silence is expensive. It means money has been spent, contracts signed and dashboards updated but the value is invisible. And it’s not just anecdotal. A 2025 study by Towergate Employee Benefits found just 39 percent of employers believed their employees had a good understanding of the full range of employee benefits provided. Hybrid work is also having an impact, with 38 percent saying it was more difficult to communicate benefits with people working at home some or all of the time.
So let’s be blunt. A benefit that employees don’t understand or act on is not a benefit. It’s a budget line gathering dust.
Why reward leaders need a marketer’s mindset
At the 2024 Benefits Expert Summit Caroline Hopper of Quietroom nailed it when talking about pension communications: these must be for doers, not readers. People only engage when there is something to act on. The same applies to every benefit. No one reads an email about childcare vouchers for fun. They read it because they need to make a choice.
This is why I think reward experts need to start thinking like marketers. Marketers obsess about cut-through. They don’t assume people are waiting eagerly for their message. They understand attention is scarce. They simplify until the story is repeatable at the kitchen table.
Benefits communication needs the same craft. Strip away jargon, acronyms and tax codes. Start telling stories about outcomes. If your employees can’t explain a benefit to a partner or friend, the communication has failed.
A marketer would never settle for that. They would test messages, find the human hook and focus on outcomes not mechanisms. They would create narratives that speak to what people value: feeling secure, protecting family, saving money, staying healthy, belonging to a community. Those stories are already in the benefits package. They just need to be brought to the surface.
Communication is a live performance
Even the best message fails if it is delivered badly. This is where most strategies collapse. Benefits don’t live in portals or PDFs. They live in conversations. Employees hear about them from their managers. And most managers are woefully under-prepared.
We’ve all seen managers mumble their way through explaining pensions, visibly praying no follow-up question is asked. If the person delivering that message is hesitant, confused or unconvincing, engagement dies.
Reward professionals must pay attention to performance. That doesn’t mean training managers to parrot scripts. It means giving them the skills to speak with confidence and clarity, to answer questions without panic, to frame the value of a benefit in the context of real lives.
This is basic communication competence, yet it is treated as optional. It should be central. If your managers cannot tell the story of your benefits, your benefits strategy is broken.
Improv lessons for reward professionals
This is where my own field, improvised theatre, can help because the principles of improv are the principles of effective communication.
The first rule is to listen. Not just wait for your turn to talk but truly listen to what the other person says, how they say it and what sits behind the words. Most benefits conversations collapse because managers deliver monologues. Employees want dialogue. They want to feel heard before they can be persuaded.
The second rule is to build. In improv we talk about “yes, and” – taking what the other person offers and adding to it. In benefits terms this means responding to concerns without shutting them down. If someone says: “This pension scheme sounds complicated,” the wrong answer is: “It’s not.” The better answer is: “It can feel complicated at first. And here’s how it works in practice.” Agreement first, explanation second. That’s how trust is built.
The third rule is to adapt. Every audience is different. The way you explain a health cash plan to a 20-year-old graduate will not be the same as how you explain it to a 50-year-old manager with three children. Good communicators flex. They adjust pace, tone and detail depending on who is in front of them. Improv trains that agility. These skills make communication authentic, agile and memorable. Without them, benefits will always feel abstract and irrelevant.
Stop hiding behind administration
Reward and HR professionals know their jobs are heavy on administration: contracts to check, portals to update, providers to manage, policies to keep compliant. It’s vital work but it’s not the work that brings benefits to life for the employee.
Meanwhile budgets will tighten. Providers will continue to innovate. AI will crunch the data and make admin easier. But no algorithm can make an employee care. If employees continue to shrug when asked about their benefits, nothing will improve.
So my challenge to you is to stop seeing communication as the last tick-box in the project plan. Start treating it as the work. The reward team of the future will be judged not just on its spreadsheets but on whether employees understand, value and use what’s offered.
And if that sounds uncomfortable, good. Because until reward leaders think like marketers, most of their benefits will remain benefits in name only.
Practical takeaways for reward leaders
- Test every benefits message: can an employee retell it in plain words?
- Train managers to explain benefits in conversations, not just point to portals.
- Frame communications around actions, not technical detail.
- Borrow from marketers: repeat simple, outcome-focused messages until they stick.
- Treat communication as a craft – it is the difference between engagement and waste.
Neil Mullarkey is a communications expert and author of In the Moment: Build your confidence, communication and creativity at work – shortlisted for The Business Book Awards 2024. He delivers keynotes, workshops and coaching to leading organisations including Google and London Business School. He improvises weekly with the Comedy Store Players in London.
