Talk to enough HR and benefits leaders and the same frustration resurfaces. They’ve done everything right: researched the programs, negotiated the contracts, run the open enrollment campaign. And the utilization numbers still don’t move.
The instinct is to try harder on the communications side. A better email, more reminders, or maybe a benefits fair will do the trick. Awareness genuinely is part of the problem, but not because employees don’t care. It’s because there’s simply too much coming at them to absorb.
Less than 20% of employees use their wellness benefits. EAP utilization averages 5% nationally. And 68% of workers say the reason they don’t engage with well-being resources is access and awareness barriers, not indifference. Most striking: 22% of managers don’t know whether their employer offers mental health benefits at all. Managers are often the most direct path between an employee and the help they need. If they don’t know what’s available, they can’t point anyone toward it.
This isn’t an apathy problem. It’s an overload problem.
What employees are already navigating before your first email goes out
The average employee spends 28% of their work week managing their inbox, roughly 2.5 hours per day. Only 38% of those messages require a meaningful response. The rest is noise. Seven in ten professionals say email is their top source of workplace stress.
Benefits communication lands on top of all of that. Now add the vendor layer. Most benefits stacks run four, five, or six separate programs. Each sends its own quarterly emails, push notifications, and onboarding campaigns, on its own schedule, typically before an employee has enrolled in anything. What the employee experiences isn’t a thoughtful benefits package, but a flood of competing messages from programs they didn’t sign up for, each asking for twenty seconds of attention they don’t have.
At some point, people stop reading. And when they stop reading, utilization drops across everything, including the programs that could genuinely make a difference.
What some employers are doing differently
The employers seeing real traction aren’t necessarily spending more. They’re reaching people differently.
The most effective shift is also the most obvious: go to where employees actually are. Email doesn’t follow a shift worker onto the floor or into the break room. Onsite events and physical touchpoints do.
“For our workforce, email alone doesn’t cut it. So many of our employees are on their feet during their shifts and not sitting at a desk checking their inbox. We’ve found that showing up in person at onsite events and meeting employees where they are, is one of the things that consistently breaks through.”
Timing matters as much as channel. A message about mental health support resonates differently in May than it does in a generic quarterly campaign. Benefits communicated around real moments — a new year, a difficult season, a life event — are far more likely to drive action than outreach tied to a vendor’s onboarding calendar. The employers seeing the highest engagement build their communications calendar around what’s happening in employees’ lives, rather than sending communications in isolation.
On the manager piece: if 22% of managers don’t know what benefits exist, a company-wide email campaign is missing its most important audience. A quick briefing before each spotlight campaign — what’s being promoted, how to use it, what to say if an employee brings it up — turns the people employees already trust into an active part of the communication strategy. A short one-pager is usually enough to give managers the context they need to answer questions confidently.
Peer stories work for the same reason. A 60-second video of a coworker describing how they used a mental health benefit after a hard stretch carries more weight. Institutional communications tell employees what’s available. Peer stories tell them it’s worth using.
One more thing ties all of this together: the shape of the offering itself. When benefits are spread across many disconnected programs, every message asks the employee to go somewhere new. But when the offering is comprehensive and connected, a single communication can do more work. A note about one program can drive enrollment in another, because employees aren’t being sent to ten different places. They’re being pointed to one.
The coordination gap
When programs compete for employee attention independently, they end up canceling each other out. When someone coordinates across the full stack — aligning timing to the benefits team’s calendar and pointing employees toward the right program at the right moment — the whole benefits investment performs better.
This is exactly the pattern we see at Levanto. Because our programs live under one connected offering rather than a scatter of point solutions, we’ve been able to reach double-digit activation across employee populations, well above the single-digit utilization that’s typical across the industry. That comes down to the same things covered above: customizing channels to fit a specific workforce, taking a seasonal approach aligned to the broader benefits calendar and company strategy, and offering a connected portfolio so employees aren’t asked to navigate ten different logins to get help.
That’s not a communications fix. It’s a structural one. And it’s the difference between a benefits package that looks good on paper and one that gets used.
The programs you’ve invested in can’t help anyone who doesn’t know they exist, can’t find them, or stopped opening the emails months ago. Closing that gap doesn’t always require more spend. It usually requires a different approach.
