HR leaders are being asked to solve a difficult operational equation right now: Between adapting to AI, managing market competition, and tightening corporate expense controls, teams are being forced to do more with less.

Finance is under significant pressure to cut costs, while business leaders still expect HR to improve retention, support recruiting, and keep teams productive. The goals haven’t changed, but the resources available to achieve them have.

Benefits are a major investment, and leaders want proof they’re working. But not every benefit contributes to the same outcome. Some help attract and retain talent; others reduce day-to-day friction or support productivity.

Getting ahead of your 2027 benefits package now gives you the time and flexibility to make smarter decisions: understanding what employees actually want, driving real value over just cutting costs, and ensuring benefits are woven into your broader business strategy rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

A benefit creates meaningful value only when it solves a real employee need, is easy to use and produces an outcome the organization cares about.

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace Report found that employee engagement fell to 20% globally from prior years, contributing to an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. In that environment, guesswork is expensive, so here are four steps to remove it.

1. Know the benefits your employees actually want and use

Relying on assumptions about what employees want isn’t enough. Internal data usually tells a different story.

According to the 2026 NFP U.S. Annual Benefits Trend Report, less than one-third of employees (28%) fully use their supplemental benefits as intended, while 13% forget they have them at all. That gap should shape how employers think about value.

Offering a benefit is not the same as delivering value. Utilization data helps separate perception from reality and should be a starting point for any benefits review.

Before making changes, review utilization data directly. Note which benefits are consistently used, which benefits see little engagement, and which benefits employees would notice if they were removed. That last question is often the most revealing.

Employers can pair vendor data with employee pulse surveys and HR service requests to understand why adoption is high or low. A low number should prompt diagnosis, not automatic elimination: the issue may be relevance, awareness or access.

2. Focus on value, not just cost

Cost pressure is real and it’s shaping every benefits conversation, but cost alone doesn’t tell the full story.

Most employers now manage a mix of programs that looked promising at launch, but never reach strong adoption. Too often, the conversation focuses on whether a benefit is worth the cost. The more important question is whether it creates enough employee and business value to justify that cost.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in June 2026 that benefit costs average $14.01 per hour or about 30% of total compensation. At that level, underused benefits create real inefficiency.

To assess value consistently, apply the same four questions to every benefit:

• Relevance: Does it solve a recurring employee need?

• Utilization: Are eligible employees actually using it?

• Accessibility: Is it easy to understand, find and use?

• Business impact: Does it support retention, productivity, recruitment or another defined workforce goal?

These questions give HR and finance teams a common language for comparing unlike programs without reducing every decision to sticker price. Leaders should be able to state the intended employee outcome, the business outcome, and the evidence they will use to evaluate both.

The review may surface high-utility options that vary by workforce, including caregiving support, transportation assistance, scheduling flexibility, mental health navigation or tools that give employees greater visibility and control over their earned pay.

The goal is to champion solutions that fit into employees’ daily lives and address recurring needs.

3. Make benefits easy to find and use

Employees expect workplace tools to match the simplicity and the immediate nature of the services they already use every day. When benefits are difficult to access or navigate, adoption suffers, even if the underlying value is strong.

Communication and access are critical to benefit design. Mercer Marsh Benefits’ Health on Demand 2025 research found that 84% of employees who receive engaging benefits communications understand the value of their benefits, compared with 33% of employees who do not.

Financial wellness illustrates why access at the moment of need matters. PwC’s 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey found that 59% of employees are stressed about their finances and warned that this distraction can create a meaningful productivity risk. A benefit designed to address that need has limited impact if an employee cannot find or use it when a bill is due.

The answer can’t be another one-time push during open enrollment. Give employees one clear front door to the full suite, explain each benefit in plain language and communicate when it is relevant. Use multiple channels and test the employee journey from discovery through use, including where people drop off or ask for help.

Start by reviewing a small set of experience metrics quarterly: help requests, enrollment or activation completion, repeat use and employee feedback. These measures reveal whether the problem is the benefit itself or the path employees must take to use it.

4. Make benefits part of business planning

Benefits still sit outside core business planning in many organizations, which limits their impact.

They influence hiring, retention, engagement, and productivity, yet they’re often evaluated separately from broader workforce strategy. In many organizations, that data already exists and the challenge remains in using it effectively in planning conversations with finance and business teams.

To change that, assign an accountable owner, typically the total rewards or benefits leader, to maintain a quarterly scorecard and bring it into planning conversations with finance and business leaders.

Before a benefit launches or renews, define the employee need and business outcome it is intended to support. The scorecard should show the eligible population, utilization, total cost and cost per active user, employee feedback and a relevant workforce measure, such as turnover in targeted roles, absence or offer acceptance. Avoid claiming causation where the data cannot support it; use trends to decide what to test, improve or stop.

Moving from cost cutting to strategic investment

Tight budgets aren’t easing, but the organizations that handle this obstacle well will allocate spending more intelligently. That starts with understanding what employees actually use and where value is being created.

As leaders enter the next benefits-planning cycle, the difference between a strong total rewards strategy and a weak one will be how deliberately it is designed, communicated, measured and used. The goal is to make every investment work harder for employees and the business.