Why trust will shape the next phase of benefits engagement

By: Satish Kannan

Human resources teams have broadened benefits across more of the employee lifecycle. Many organisations now offer benefits across physical health, mental wellbeing, employee assistance programmes (EAPs), caregiving, financial wellness, learning, leave, and family support. These are often shaped by surveys, focus groups, life-stage insights, and manager feedback. Yet a persistent question remains: are employees truly using what we have created for them?

Across organisations, the pattern is familiar. For instance, employees don’t always choose the right insurance coverage even when flexible options exist. Employer-sponsored preventive medical tests are often used by only around 40% of the workforce. EAPs remain underutilised despite being widely available. These aren’t isolated data points but reflect a deeper trust and engagement gap. As organisations explore artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled personalisation, that trust question becomes central to benefits engagement.

Where trust is breaking down

There are five recurring places where employees lose trust in the benefits system, each quietly suppressing utilisation.

• Awareness and decision confidence gap: Medical and retirement decisions often dominate enrolment, leaving caregiving, mental health, financial wellness, and EAP support less visible. When circumstances change months later, employees may not remember which resource applies. From my experience, one of the biggest challenges also lies in decision-making confidence. Faced with multiple choices, employees often feel overwhelmed and make suboptimal selections or postpone decisions because they’re unsure about whom to trust for guidance.

• Relevance gap: Preventive health initiatives suffer from a different issue. When employees feel fine, health risks feel abstract. Without immediate relevance, participation drops, even when programmes are fully sponsored by the employer.

• Access and navigation gap: Even motivated employees can struggle to reach support. Benefits systems may require multiple logins, unfamiliar plan language, separate portals, or information that employees don’t have readily available. Each added step creates friction, especially during stressful moments.

• Trust, privacy, and help-seeking gap: As benefits become more personalised, unclear data use can make recommendations feel intrusive rather than helpful. There is still hesitation, discomfort, and even embarrassment in reaching out to EAPs or mental health resources. We continue to say, “it is okay to be not okay,” yet many employees still hesitate to seek help because they fear appearing weak, exposed, or professionally vulnerable.

Build a trust-based engagement framework

Closing these gaps requires a framework built around five practical levers:

• Visibility: Employees should understand what information the system uses, why it is used, and what action it may trigger. Privacy expectations should be visible at the point of use, not buried in long policies.
• Granular consent: Employees should be able to choose the support they receive. For example, they may accept caregiving recommendations while declining mental health prompts or receiving financial wellness suggestions without enabling behavioural analysis.
• Third-party trust: One important CHRO lesson is that organisations must be explicit and repetitive about confidentiality. Employees need to know that sensitive wellbeing services are handled by independent, professional third parties, and that the employer has no access to personal or identifiable data.
• Normalising support: Organisational culture has to move beyond resilience narratives and actively encourage professional help when needed. Seeking support should be seen as a strength, not a failure.
• Manager enablement: Managers are often the first to notice signs of strain, but their role should be supportive, not investigative. They need plain-language guidance to recognise stress, normalise wellbeing conversations, and direct employees to appropriate resources while respecting privacy boundaries.

What HR leaders should do next

Benefits leaders should start with a structured audit of the employee experience, reviewing utilisation patterns alongside listening signals to see where trust weakens. The focus should be practical: can employees find answers quickly, compare options confidently, and reach support without friction?

AI-enabled repositories and conversational tools can help by bringing benefits, information, policies, and common processes into one searchable experience. They can answer routine questions, guide employees to the right resource, and reduce delays, with human escalation available for sensitive or complex needs.

One example from my experience makes this clear: aggregated and anonymised health data once revealed that nearly 30% of senior employees were at high risk of heart disease, significantly above industry benchmarks. This insight allowed leadership to prioritise preventive health interventions without compromising individual privacy. When data is handled responsibly, it becomes a tool for care, not control.

Ultimately, wellbeing cannot remain a peripheral benefits conversation. It must sit at the core of HR strategy and be backed by visible leadership commitment from the top. The organisations that close the benefits engagement gap will not be those with the most benefits, but those that design experiences around transparency, consent, and human dignity. When trust is present, employees are far more likely to step forward, especially when they need support the most.

About the author: Satish Kannan is the Chief People Officer at Bounteous, with over 25 years of HR leadership experience specializing in aligning people-strategies with business growth, talent development, and optimizing HR operations across global markets. He holds a degree in Human Resource Management and advanced certifications from Wharton and Cornell and is recognized in the HR space for leading HR teams, building global capabilities, high-performing cultures, and driving Talent Transformation.