The Benefit You Brag About Is the One Nobody Uses

There's a benefit in your package that you mention in every recruiting conversation. Maybe it's the mental health coverage. Maybe it's the telemedicine offering. Maybe it's the dental plan with orthodontia.

You mention it because it sounds good. It probably is good, on paper.

But when's the last time you checked whether anyone actually used it?

The Gap Between Offering and Experiencing

This pattern shows up repeatedly in mid-size company plan reviews: an employer invests in a benefit, highlights it as a competitive differentiator, and then never looks at whether employees can actually navigate to it.

The mental health benefit has a provider network with a six-week wait for new patients. The telemedicine line requires a login through a portal nobody can find after the welcome email. The orthodontia coverage has an annual maximum so low it barely covers the first retainer.

Employees try once. It doesn't work. They don't try again. They don't tell HR. They file it away under "benefits that look better than they are."

The employer keeps bragging about it.

Why Leaders Miss This

It's not that leaders don't care. It's that the system doesn't provide feedback. Carriers report enrollment data. They report claims in aggregate. They don't call you to say "three employees gave up on this benefit last quarter because the network was unusable."

That information lives in the experience of your employees, and nobody has created a formal channel to surface it.

Meanwhile, the broker who set up the plan is focused on next renewal. The HR team is managing the day-to-day. Nobody's running quality control on the gap between the benefit as it was sold and the benefit as it functions.

The Signal Hiding in Utilization Data

Low utilization isn't always a sign of a benefit nobody needs. Sometimes it's exactly that. But sometimes it's a sign of a benefit nobody could figure out how to use, or one they tried once and abandoned.

The way to tell the difference is to ask. Not in an all-hands survey. Quietly, in a targeted conversation. Ask the HR team what questions they get about the benefit. Ask a few employees who enrolled in it whether they've used it and what the experience was like.

What you learn may change how you talk about that benefit. It may change whether you keep it. It will almost certainly change your relationship to the idea that your plan is working just because nobody complained.

The stakes behind that conversation are real. According to SHRM's 2025 analysis, only 61% of employees feel satisfied with their benefits, and 84% say offerings don't meet their needs, even though most feel informed about them. That combination, knowing what's available but finding it falls short, is precisely the pattern a utilization review is designed to surface.

Consider a 120-person healthcare services company in the Midwest. The HR Director regularly pointed to a robust employee assistance program as a differentiator in recruiting conversations. Utilization data told a different story: fewer than 4% of enrolled employees had accessed it in the prior year. A brief round of informal conversations revealed the problem: employees believed the EAP was only for severe mental health crises, not the everyday financial counseling and stress support it also provided. One targeted communication effort tripled access within two quarters.

What Changes When You Look

When you identify a benefit that's failing in practice, you have options. You can work with your broker to find a better-functioning alternative. You can build a simple navigation guide so employees know exactly how to access it. You can evaluate whether the money is better deployed somewhere that will actually be used.

The goal isn't to cut benefits. It's to make benefits that function rather than benefits that look good in a recruiting deck.

When employees discover that a benefit you described to them actually works the way you said, trust goes up. That's not nothing. In a market where people are evaluating offers from multiple companies, trust in your benefits story is part of the offer.

A well-functioning benefit also becomes a retention anchor. Research from Thatch found that 64% of workers say better health benefits would make them stay in a job. A benefit employees can't locate or navigate doesn't provide that anchor, regardless of how prominently it appears in the open enrollment guide.

The Work Institute's 2024 Retention Report consistently finds that benefits and compensation rank among the top reasons employees leave voluntarily. Identifying which specific benefits generate frustration, before those frustrations become departure decisions, is what utilization data makes possible.

Where to Start

Ask your HR team to pull utilization data by benefit category for the past 12 months. Then identify the three benefits with the lowest utilization relative to how many employees enrolled in them.

For each one, ask a single question: is this low because employees don't need it, or because they couldn't use it?

The answer shapes what you do next.

Sources

• SHRM. "Employee Satisfaction with Benefits Drops," 2025. shrm.org

• Thatch. "Why Employees Leave: It's About Health Benefits," 2025. linkedin.com/posts/thatch-com

• Work Institute. 2024 Retention Report, 2024. workinstitute.com