When budgets are tight, leadership changes, or political discourse shifts, inclusive benefits often get cut because they are seen as symbolic, not strategic. HR leaders struggle to prove ROI – return on inclusion – not because these programs intrinsically lack value, but because they were never embedded enough in the organisation to deliver it.
For advisers, this is the central challenge. It’s easy to get a green-light for investment in the commonplace or low-cost benefits that are well understood. But defending the benefits that really move the needle on inclusion and bring your values to life requires a different kind of client conversation.
The reality is that the benefits schemes of yesteryear were designed with a fundamentally different employee profile in mind – one that no longer reflects the diverse reality of today’s UK workforce. Today’s benefits must meet employees where they are, catering to their unique identities, home lives, family situations, responsibilities, health profiles, and more. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all benefits that assume everyone has the same needs.
To offer truly inclusive benefits, clients must think about both breadth and depth of their offerings. Some situations call for expanding program inclusion criteria to be more inclusive. For example, perhaps your client needs to expand their parental leave scheme to include parents of all genders or also include parents welcoming children via adoption.
But clients also need to focus on support services that will deepen their EVP for specific groups – for example, perhaps they need to offer elder care support for people of aging parents, access to gender affirming care for transgender and non-binary employees, or specialised coaching for neurodiverse employees. To quantify the ROI of these programs, clients will have to move beyond looking for maximum uptake for minimal cost, and instead assess whether or not the programs are making an impact where it matters.
But expanding your offerings and hoping for impact is not enough. Thoughtful implementation, communication, and a deep understanding of your employee benefits journey can make or break your clients’ inclusive benefits program – and ultimately your business case to keep these programs in place.
Partner with your clients to help them understand not just which benefits programs must be broader or deeper, but also what artificial barriers they are creating to uptake. Do employees know about these programs? How would a new joiner find out they exist? Are they freely available or are they by request only? Do they have to disclose something sensitive about their identity to a manager to access them? Ensuring the right employee journey is in place is the first step to ensuring return on inclusivity.
Once programs and journeys are in place, are they then working? Regular employee feedback helps employers understand where language, trust, process or culture is getting in the way of uptake – and gives advisers the intelligence to make a stronger case for redesign.
Then there is the question of quantifying ROI. To make informed benefits decisions and deliver meaningful outcomes for employees and business, you need data – yet research shows that only 38 per cent of organisations use data and analytics to prove impact and ROI from benefits investment.
Whilst data can feel overwhelming to time-poor HR leaders, a good benefits platform can break it down. If your client can’t see who is and isn’t engaging with benefits provision by demographic, life stage, household type, caring responsibility, and more, then they can’t make the case for investment, identify where design is failing, or demonstrate they are having the intended impact. Armed with data, uptake patterns, employee feedback and drop-off points across different groups become a valuable source of information – and a powerful tool for advisers.
The business case for inclusive benefits is wide-ranging. The issue most employers encounter is that uptake of benefits seems low, feeding a perception that benefits are a waste of money. Often, the problem isn’t the benefits themselves, but the way they’re being implemented – uninclusively and therefore ineffectively. Once this is addressed, uptake increases, and inclusivity delivers returns like increased engagement, improved productivity, and better retention.