The Questions Employees Ask HR Are a Map of Where the Benefits Package Is Failing

Employees form their view of a benefits package long after open enrolment has closed, and they form it in specific places. At the pharmacy counter, unsure whether a purchase is eligible for a health savings account. In the claims portal, unable to work out the next step and logging out. At the point of realising a deadline has already passed before they understood what they were supposed to do.

Dave Etling, senior vice president and general manager of InComm Benefits, has spent his career at the junction of benefits, payments and technology, and keeps arriving at the same conclusion. A benefit can be generous on paper and still disappoint in practice.

Employers know the benefits matter

The commitment is not in question. The SHRM 2026 Employee Benefits Survey found that 88 per cent of employers rated health-related benefits as very or extremely important to their workforce.

But presence is not value. InComm's own survey of more than 300 HR professionals who manage health savings accounts and other spending accounts found that nearly three-quarters treat employee feedback as the leading factor when reassessing a provider.

It also found what those professionals are most frustrated by in their current providers, which is the employee experience.

Etling reads the first finding as encouraging, because it means these decisions are not being made purely on cost comparisons and enrolment numbers. The difficulty is timing. Feedback usually enters the conversation too late, after complaints have accumulated or utilisation has fallen short.

There is a difference between a benefit employees do not want and one they want but cannot use

The feedback is already arriving

Most organisations picture employee feedback as an annual engagement survey. Useful, but slow, and not where the best information is.

The better source is the questions people ask every day. According to InComm's research, HR teams are asked most often about how to use an HSA, which purchases are eligible, how to submit a claim, when the deadlines fall and how the rollover rules work.

Individually those look like routine administrative queries. Collectively they are a map of exactly where the benefits experience is breaking down.

That distinction carries the whole argument. There is a substantial difference between a benefit employees do not want and one they want but struggle to use. Organisations that miss it respond to low engagement by changing the benefit, when the problem was everything surrounding it.

Three questions to apply to a pattern

Not every complaint warrants a response. A single one may reflect an unusual circumstance. A question recurring across departments, employee populations or stages of the benefits year is far more likely to indicate something structural.

When a pattern appears, Etling suggests asking three things. How many employees does this affect. Does it prevent or discourage them from using the benefit. And how much additional work does it create for HR.

The third is the one most often left out, because employee friction and HR workload tend to be treated as separate problems. They are the same problem. When somebody cannot find an answer, complete a claim or understand a process, HR becomes the default support desk by elimination.

Which means the improvements worth making are the ones that make a benefit easier to use and simultaneously reduce the queue outside HR.

Asking creates an obligation

Soliciting feedback sets an expectation that something follows. Not every suggestion can become policy and not every source of friction can be removed, but organisations should say what they heard, what they are changing and what has to stay as it is.

Then they should measure it. Did the repetitive questions decline. Did utilisation move.

Etling's wider point is directed at providers as much as employers. HR teams are already carrying a great deal and should not also be the permanent help desk for benefits support. Employers, for their part, should be assessing partners not only on cost and features but on what happens after somebody enrols.

For years benefits strategy has been organised around one question, which is what to offer. Etling thinks the next era belongs to a different one: what it is actually like for employees to use what is already on the table.

The answer, as he puts it, is probably already sitting in the inbox.