Lushan Sundram, Senior Sales & Business Development Manager at Essential Employee Benefits
Every year, Human Resource (HR) teams across South Africa enter the same employee benefits cycle. Rates are negotiated, packages are reviewed and employees are presented with a menu of benefits. Once the process is complete, the organisation can say it has a comprehensive benefits offering.
But there is a fundamental question that often goes unanswered: how do we know these benefits address the problems our employees are actually facing?
The pressures affecting employees are increasingly intertwined. Financial stress can impact mental health. Poor mental health can affect physical health and productivity. Health issues can create more financial strain. Yet benefits are often structured as separate products designed to address individual risks. The result is a benefits portfolio that may be comprehensive on paper but poorly aligned with the workforce it is intended to support.
The challenge for HR is particularly difficult because the information needed to improve that alignment is deeply personal. Organisations need to understand workforce risks, but they cannot simply ask employees to disclose their debt, mental health diagnoses, relationship safety concerns or chronic medical conditions.
HR is therefore expected to design medical cover for risks that it is often not permitted to see.
The business cost is already visible
The consequences of this disconnect are not limited to employee wellbeing, however, they are being demonstrated in business performance.
Absenteeism alone is estimated to cost the South African economy R19.1 billion annually. But absence is the most obvious expression of a workforce under pressure. Employees can be present but physically, mentally or emotionally depleted to perform effectively.
Mental health-related lost productivity is estimated by the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) at R232 billion a year.
Retention is also a warning. SADAG workplace data indicates that 61% of employed South Africans would leave their current jobs tomorrow if they could afford to, while total employee turnover has increased by 15.5% – a 42% year-on-year increase.
These trends suggest that employers cannot afford to assess benefits based on asking whether they have enough of them. The more useful question is whether the benefits are addressing the conditions that influence health, engagement, productivity and employees’ ability to remain at work.
The workforce is telling us where the gaps are
Aggregated, anonymised workforce diagnostics from27,592 unique South African employees provide a clearer picture of what lies below these business outcomes. For example, 43.9% of staff reported that they do not feel safe, emotionally and physically, in their intimate relationships, highlighting a gender-based-violence issue within this workforce that HR had previously been unable to see. For perspective, this percentage equates to just over 12 100 people, all going through it in silence.
Wellbeing issues like these are not isolated but have an effect on how people sleep, concentrate, manage stress, make decisions and perform at work. The physical indicators reinforce the same concern. Within the cohort, the average employee was 41 years old but had an average Heart Age of 44 and Metabolic Age of 43. The gap suggests that unmanaged physical, emotional and vascular risks are already impacting employees’ health profiles prior to how their chronological age would necessarily indicate it.
For HR, this creates an important differentiation: the benefits employees need cannot be determined reliably from the benefits they are currently utilising.
Privacy is not the problem to solve
It may be tempting to suggest that HR simply needs more employee data, but that is not the solution.
The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and employment equity regulations provide legitimate limitations to what personal information organisations can collect and utilise. Employees should not be expected to disclose highly sensitive information to their employer in exchange for the organisation designing a better benefits programme. The privacy barrier should therefore remain intact.
What needs to change is the way organisations obtain workforce insight.
Anonymous diagnostics can bridge the information gap
Secure, anonymous third-party diagnostic screening provides employees the opportunity to assess their health and wellness privately while providing HR with a picture of risks across the workforce.
The differentiation is important. HR does not need to know that a particular employee is facing debt, experiencing emotional distress or managing a chronic condition. It needs to know whether these risks are prevalent across the employee population and where support may be required.
Through secure systems provided by experienced benefits providers, individual information can be encrypted, redacted and aggregated into a population-level risk profile. HR can then work with the benefits provider to interpret these patterns, identify gaps and structure their benefits portfolio around the needs that are actually present.
This creates a more informed pathway between workforce risk and benefits investment.
The provider becomes part of the strategy
This also changes what organisations should expect from a benefits provider. The role should extend beyond merely negotiating rates or supplying products. A strategic provider should be able to assist employers in understanding their workforce, interpreting risk, identifying where existing benefits are lacking and connecting employees to relevant support.
That includes assisting employers in interpreting data, segmenting their workforce, improving access and communicating benefits in such a way that employees can understand and utilise them. The objective is not to create a longer benefits list. It is to create a more responsive one.
A gym discount, for example, may be useful to some employees. But if the workforce is experiencing significant financial distress, emotional exhaustion and emerging health risks, the organisation needs to understand that before deciding where its next rand of benefits spend should go.
From buying benefits to managing outcomes
This is ultimately a shift from a procurement mindset to an outcomes mindset. A benefits portfolio should be assessed not only by what it costs or how many benefits it contains, but by whether it reaches employees, addresses identified risks and produces measurable improvement in health, wellbeing, engagement and productivity.
This requires three things: better workforce insight, protection of employee privacy and a provider capable of translating that insight into practical benefits solutions.
South African employers are already absorbing the cost of financial stress, mental health challenges, poor physical health and disengagement through lost productivity and retention pressures. The data shows that these problems exist, therefore organisations should question whether they will continue to design benefits around assumptions, or utilise secure, anonymous insight to understand what their workforce actually needs.
The most effective benefits strategy may therefore begin before the next benefit is purchased. It begins by understanding the workforce without compromising the privacy of the people within it.
Ed’s note: EBnet’s 2026 Evolutionaries Conference digs deeper into the industry’s dialogue of integrated or holistic benefits. It’s free and it’s virtual – meaning you can engage with the content and the service providers you want to, during the week of 26 – 30 October. Register here.
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