Employee listening: the missing link in your benefits and total rewards strategy

Designing an employee benefits package can feel like trying to hit a moving target.

Costs keep rising. Employee expectations are changing. Leaders want proof that your investments are working. Employees want “better benefits,” but what they mean by that depends on who you ask.

In a lot of organizations, benefits strategy ends up being shaped by renewal deadlines, vendor demos, and whatever benefits trends are dominating LinkedIn that quarter.

But there’s a better way to build a benefits and total rewards strategy — one that’s more strategic, more equitable, and more likely to drive measurable outcomes.

It starts with employee listening.

When HR leaders build a strong employee listening strategy, benefits decisions stop being guesswork and start being guided by real employee needs, data, and priorities. And with the right broker partner, employee listening becomes a repeatable process that improves your program year over year.

What is employee listening?

Employee listening is often treated like a buzzword, but it’s one of the most practical tools HR teams have, especially when it comes to benefits and total rewards.

At its core, employee listening is the ongoing process of collecting and acting on employee feedback. It includes how you gather insights, how you interpret them, and how you use them to shape decisions that affect employees.

This is where a lot of organizations get stuck. They might run an annual engagement survey. Or they might send a quick pulse survey during open enrollment. They gather feedback, but then it disappears into a slide deck or a spreadsheet.

That approach gathers data, but it doesn’t rise to the level of employee listening needed to shape a strategic benefits program.

A true employee listening strategy is structured, intentional, and continuous. It’s designed to inform decisions, build trust, and improve the employee experience over time.

Why employee listening matters for benefits and total rewards

Employee benefits are one of the biggest investments most employers make, and unfortunately, also one of the hardest to evaluate.

You can measure cost. You can measure participation. But it’s much harder to measure whether your benefits are actually meeting employee needs.

That’s exactly where employee listening becomes a strategic advantage.

Employee listening reduces wasted spend

HR teams are often asked to do more with less. At the same time, benefits costs continue to climb, especially for medical, pharmacy, and specialty care.

Without employee listening, it’s easy to invest in benefits that look good on paper but don’t solve real problems for your workforce. Or to overlook benefits employees would value highly because they’re not flashy or trending.

Employee listening helps you answer questions like:

• Are employees actually able to access the care they need?
• Which benefits do employees consider “must-haves” versus “nice-to-haves”?
• What is driving dissatisfaction, confusion, or frustration?
• Where are we spending money that employees don’t feel or value?

When you can connect employee feedback to benefits cost and utilization data, you can prioritize investments that have real impact.

Employee listening helps you design for a diverse workforce

Most workforces aren’t a single “employee persona.” You likely have employees across different life stages, family situations, geographies, and income levels, and they don’t experience benefits the same way.

A benefits package that works for a 27-year-old employee in a city may not work for a 42-year-old employee supporting dependents. A remote employee’s priorities may differ from an on-site employee’s. A low-income employee may have different barriers than a high-income employee, even if they have the same health plan.

Employee listening helps HR leaders move beyond averages.

Instead of asking, “What do employees want?” you can ask:

• What do different employee groups need to thrive?
• What barriers are preventing employees from using existing benefits?
• Where are employees falling through the cracks?

This is one of the most important ways employee listening can strengthen your total rewards strategy.

Employee listening improves engagement in the benefits you already offer

A common frustration for HR teams is investing in high-value programs, only to see low engagement.

This is often framed as a communication problem, but in reality it’s usually a mix of:

• Employees not understanding the benefit
• Employees not trusting the benefit
• Employees not knowing when or how to use it
• The benefit being too complex to access
• The benefit being technically available, but practically unusable

Employee listening helps you identify the real barriers.

For example, employees may say they want “better mental health support.” You might assume the answer is adding a new vendor. But employee listening may reveal that employees already have access to therapy through the plan, they just can’t find in-network providers or they don’t know how to navigate their options.

That insight leads to a different solution: one focused on access, navigation, and education rather than adding more vendors.

What an effective employee listening strategy looks like

Employee listening is most valuable when it’s tied to decisions.

The goal is not to collect feedback for the sake of feedback. The goal is to use employee feedback to design benefits and total rewards programs that meet employee needs and align with your organization’s goals.

A strong employee listening strategy typically includes five steps.

Step 1: Define what you’re trying to learn

Before you send a survey or schedule focus groups, clarify what decisions you’re trying to inform.

For benefits and total rewards, common goals include:

• Redesigning medical plan options
• Evaluating a new vendor category, like fertility or caregiving support
• Improving open enrollment engagement and understanding
• Reducing benefits cost without reducing employee satisfaction
• Identifying gaps in your current total rewards package

When employee listening is tied to a specific decision, your questions become sharper and your insights become more actionable.

Step 2: Use multiple listening channels

Employee listening isn’t one thing. It is a system.

The most effective employee listening strategies combine multiple inputs, such as:

• Benefits-specific surveys
• Open enrollment pulse surveys
• Focus groups or listening sessions
• Employee resource groups (ERGs)
• Exit interviews and stay interviews
• HR ticket trends and common questions
• Utilization data from carriers
• Claims and cost data (when available)

Each channel tells you something different.

Quantitative data can show you what’s happening, like low utilization or high out-of-network claims. Qualitative feedback can show you why, like confusion, access issues, or lack of trust.

When you use both, your benefits strategy becomes far more grounded.

Step 3: Segment your workforce

One of the biggest mistakes in employee listening is treating employees as a single group.

Even a small company has meaningful differences in benefits needs.

Segmentation can include:

• Location (especially for network access)
• Salary bands (especially for affordability)
• Life stage (early career, caregivers, pre-retirement)
• Family status (dependents vs no dependents)
• Job type (frontline, hourly, salaried, remote)

This is especially important for equity.

When you segment employee feedback, you can identify where your benefits program is working well for some groups and failing for others. That is one of the most powerful uses of employee listening for HR leaders.

Step 4: Turn insights into action

Employee listening only works if it drives change.

That doesn’t mean you need to implement every request. In fact, it’s important not to treat employee listening as a wish list.

Instead, use listening insights to:

• Prioritize investments
• Identify root causes of dissatisfaction
• Make strategic trade-offs
• Improve access and usability
• Strengthen communication and education

For example, you may learn that employees are asking for richer benefits. But the root issue might be that employees don’t understand what they already have.

Or you may learn that employees want lower payroll deductions. That may lead to a contribution strategy adjustment rather than a full plan redesign.

The key is to translate feedback into strategy, not just collect it.

Step 5: Close the loop and build trust

One of the fastest ways to damage trust is to ask employees for feedback and then go silent.

Closing the loop is essential for a sustainable employee listening strategy.

That can look like:

• Sharing key themes, not raw data
• Communicating what changes you will make and why
• Explaining what you cannot change and why
• Creating a “you said, we did” summary
• Setting expectations for future listening cycles

When employees see that their feedback leads to action, they’re more likely to participate in future listening efforts and more likely to trust HR as a strategic partner.

How your broker can support employee listening

Employee listening is not only an internal HR responsibility. It can be a powerful area of partnership with your broker.

Traditionally, many brokers focus on renewal negotiations, plan comparisons, and vendor sourcing. Those services matter, but they’re not enough for HR leaders trying to build a modern total rewards strategy.

A strategic broker can help you build and execute an employee listening strategy in ways that many HR teams can’t do alone.

A broker can help you design the listening approach

Survey design is harder than it looks.

A good broker can help you:

• Develop benefits-specific survey questions
• Avoid leading questions or vague prompts
• Identify what to ask before renewal versus after
• Benchmark survey results against similar employers

This makes your employee listening more actionable and less likely to produce confusing or contradictory results.

A broker can connect employee feedback to claims and cost data

One of the most valuable contributions a broker can make is connecting employee sentiment to real plan performance.

For example:

• Employees report poor access to mental health care
• Claims data shows high out-of-network behavioral health utilization
• Carrier reports show low EAP engagement

That combination points to a specific problem, and it can guide a specific strategy. It might include changes to network design, navigation support, vendor partnerships, or targeted education.

This is where employee listening becomes more than a survey. It becomes a decision-making engine.

A broker can help you prioritize and build a multi-year roadmap

Employee listening often surfaces more needs than any HR team can address in a single year.

A broker can help you:

• Prioritize changes based on cost, impact, and feasibility
• Model the financial implications of different options
• Build a multi-year benefits roadmap
• Align benefits strategy with broader total rewards goals

This is especially valuable for HR leaders who are balancing employee needs, budget constraints, and leadership expectations.

A broker can support communication and change management

Employee listening is only valuable if employees understand what changes are being made and how to use the benefits they have.

A broker can support:

• Open enrollment messaging and education
• Targeted campaigns based on known pain points
• Manager enablement for benefits conversations
• Measurement of engagement after changes roll out

This is often the difference between a benefit that exists and a benefit that employees actually use.

Common mistakes to avoid in employee listening

Employee listening is powerful, but it can backfire if it is handled poorly.

Here are some common mistakes HR leaders can avoid:

Treating employee listening as a one-time project

Employee listening should be a cycle, not a single event.

A one-time survey may give you useful data, but it won’t build a long-term strategy. Benefits needs change over time, and your listening approach should evolve with them.

Asking questions that don’t lead to decisions

Broad questions like “What benefits do you want?” often produce feedback that’s hard to interpret and even harder to act on.

A better approach is to ask questions tied to decisions, like:

• What barriers do you face in accessing care?
• Which benefits do you use most, and why?
• What benefits do you wish you had access to, and what problem would they solve?

Failing to segment feedback

If you only look at aggregate results, you may miss the fact that certain groups are having a very different experience.

Segmentation helps you design benefits that work for your whole workforce, not just the majority.

Not closing the loop

When employees share feedback and don’t hear what happened next, they learn that their input does not matter.

Closing the loop is one of the simplest, most effective ways to build trust and strengthen participation in future listening.

Employee listening turns benefits into a competitive advantage

The best benefits strategies are not built on assumptions, trends, or whoever has the best sales pitch.

They are built on understanding your employees.

A strong employee listening strategy helps HR leaders:

• Invest benefits dollars where they matter most
• Improve access, equity, and engagement
• Design programs for a diverse workforce
• Build trust through transparency and action
• Create a benefits and total rewards strategy that improves year over year

And with the right broker partner, employee listening becomes more than a survey. It becomes a repeatable system that strengthens your benefits program, supports your people, and makes your total rewards strategy more strategic, sustainable, and effective.