Employees aren’t confused about their benefits—they’re anxious
Benefits anxiety is a strategic signal HR leaders keep misreading as a communication problem — and the vendors selling "benefits literacy" tools may be making it worse.
The news
New survey data from HR Executive reveals that employees aren’t struggling to understand their benefits — they’re anxious about making the wrong choice in a high-stakes, low-margin financial environment. The research shows that open enrollment questions are less about plan mechanics and more about fear: fear of unexpected costs, fear of choosing wrong, fear of what happens if something goes wrong. Read the full piece here.
My take
HR has been solving the wrong problem for years. The industry defaulted to “benefits literacy” as the diagnosis — employees just don’t get their options — and that spawned an entire category of decision-support tools, explainer videos, enrollment chatbots, and simplified plan summaries. Some of that is genuinely useful. But if the underlying emotion is anxiety, not confusion, then clearer content doesn’t fix it. You can explain a high-deductible health plan in plain English six different ways and still not address the fact that an employee is one emergency room visit away from a financial crisis they can’t absorb.
This is the kind of signal HR leaders should be taking to the C-suite — not as a benefits administration problem, but as a workforce stability problem. When employees are anxious about their benefits, that anxiety doesn’t stay contained to open enrollment. It shows up in productivity, in engagement scores, in retention conversations. I’ve worked with clients whose employee survey data had obvious anxiety markers buried in benefits-adjacent questions that nobody connected to anything strategic. They were treating it as an HR ops issue. It was a business risk conversation they weren’t having.
The vendors in this space — benefits navigation platforms, enrollment tech, decision-support tools — are marketing to the confusion narrative because it’s a cleaner sell. “We simplify benefits” is an easier pitch than “we help employees feel financially secure enough to focus on work.” The second one is harder to demo. But it’s the right problem.
The so-what
HR leaders who recognize this distinction have a real opportunity to reframe the benefits conversation internally — from administrative overhead to employee financial resilience, which is a business outcome leadership actually cares about. I’d tell my clients to pull their open enrollment support ticket data and read it for emotional tone, not just topic. The questions employees are asking reveal what they’re afraid of, and that’s more useful than any satisfaction score.
Benefits anxiety is a workforce risk. Start treating it like one.