Written by Turiya Gray

Turiya Gray is a dynamic HR executive with 20+ years of experience building workplaces where people and performance actually thrive. Turiya is obsessed with making work better for everyone and known for her sharp insights, impactful leadership, and passion for helping organizations get people and culture right. She is also the cohost of the top-rated HR unConfidential podcast that launched in 2018. Currently, Turiya serves as Senior Partner & Fractional Chief People Officer at FXG Partners, partnering with midsize companies to deliver thoughtful, high-impact HR leadership.

Connect with Turiya on LinkedIn.

I’ve built and rebuilt HR tech infrastructure at scaling companies more than once, and there’s a very real tipping point that shows up somewhere between 100 and 300 employees. When people search for an HR tech stack for midsize companies, they’re usually in this exact stage.

Processes that were once good enough quietly morph into time thieves. Employee experience becomes more complex and less consistent. You lose visibility into people-related trends and costs. And HR teams find themselves stitching together workarounds instead of shaping the business.

If you’re evaluating your HR tech stack as your company grows or wondering when it’s time to move beyond what’s been working, read on for some practical insights from someone who’s been there. This isn’t a best tools list; it’s my reflections on how I’d build my HR tech stack if I were stepping into a 200–300-person company tomorrow, grounded in what I’ve seen work (and fail) in real life.

Why 200–300 employees changes everything

At 50–100 employees, HR can often rely on proximity and memory. You know people by name, the exceptions are manageable, and the homegrown workarounds are known and seem to “work.”

Somewhere between 200 and 300 employees, that model stops working. It’s not just more people; it’s more layers of management, a more dynamic employee population (locations, job types, tenure, etc.), and increasing demands on HR’s time and impact.

The operational symptoms, like inefficient processes, lack of clean data, and poor employee experience, show up fast. But underneath those symptoms, bigger strategic issues start to emerge:

• HR team burnout. The HR team’s workload expands with every new hire, but headcount doesn’t keep pace. What used to feel manageable starts to crowd out the work that actually moves the business forward: strategic planning, leadership development, and culture building. 
• Loss of prioritization.  Without systems to surface patterns and data to guide decisions, everything feels equally urgent. HR ends up reacting to whoever’s loudest instead of focusing on what will have the most impact.
• Credibility gap. The business starts to experience HR as process managers instead of business enablers; not because of intent, but because of capacity and tooling gaps.
• Reactive decision-making. Without clean data, people-related decisions become opinion-based instead of business-backed.

At this size, you’re small enough that inefficiency hits hard in HR bandwidth, leadership effectiveness, and the bottom line. But you’re big enough that “we’ll fix it later” is no longer a viable strategy. This is when HR tech stops being a convenience and becomes critical infrastructure.

The HR tech stack I’d build for a midsize company (200–300 employees)

At this stage, I resist the urge to jump to specific tools first. I start by thinking about the ideal outcomes.

If your company is hovering around 200 employees with a patchwork tech stack, the first move is almost always to stabilize your HRIS and payroll. If that foundation is shaky, every other system you add will require more cleanup, more manual work, and more frustration. Once that’s solid, move to hiring and onboarding, then everything else.

Here are the core layers I’d focus on:

1. A strong system of record (HRIS + payroll)

This is your foundation and it needs to be boring but reliable and scalable. Clear processes, clean data, compliance, and integrations that don’t require duct tape are critical.

I’ve used systems like Rippling, Namely, and UKG at this stage. Each had different strengths depending on the company’s complexity and growth trajectory.

What to look for:

• Reporting that doesn’t require a data analyst to build
• Flexible permissions as you add managers, admins, or employee self-service
• Integrations that actually work (and stay working)
• Data that flows to and from other systems without constant manual fixes

2. Hiring and onboarding that feel seamless

Hiring and onboarding set the tone for every employee relationship. A clunky process here creates drag for recruiters, confusion for candidates, and a rocky start for new hires.

I’ve implemented Greenhouse and SilkRoad (now Rival) for applicant tracking and onboarding based on the customization and seamless integration experience. 

What to look for:

• Automation where it matters: scheduling, posting, screening questions
• A clear stance on how AI reduces bias without introducing new risks (like fake applicants flooding your pool)
• Hiring manager access to review candidates and provide feedback without creating bottlenecks
• Seamless handoff from “offer accepted” to “first-day ready,” whether that’s in one system or two that integrate flawlessly
• Compliance tracking (I-9s, new hire paperwork, etc.) that’s simple and auditable
• Flexibility to customize onboarding based on role, location, or team

3. Performance tools that don’t turn into bureaucracy

You need easy-to-use tools that offer simple goal-setting, the ability to run performance feedback cycles that actually fit your business needs and culture, and that strengthen manager capability without turning performance into a time-intensive exercise.

I’ve worked with tools like Lattice and 15Five. The key was picking one that met our unique needs rather than forcing our culture to match the tool.

What to look for:

• Lightweight enough that managers will actually use it
• Customizable cycles (not rigid annual reviews if that’s not your style)
• Integration with your HRIS so you’re not managing two sets of employee data

4. Making total rewards actually manageable

This is the layer that breaks fastest when you scale. How you manage compensation, benefits administration, perks/stipends, and recognition quietly turns into admin chaos, compliance headaches, and employee frustration.

Before implementing Compt, my team was fielding a lot of eligibility questions about our perks program and spent hours processing stipend requests. Compt brought structure: employees got clarity on what they could use, Finance got real-time visibility into spend, and HR got meaningful time back (often 10+ hours a month).

Compt just worked, and that’s exactly what all of your HR tech stack should do.

What to look for:

• Compensation planning tools that integrate with your HRIS (so you’re not exporting spreadsheets to model raises, promotions, or equity)
• Benefits administration that reduces enrollment headaches (employee self-service, carrier integrations, and clear communication at open enrollment)
• Employee self-service for perks and stipends (so HR isn’t answering the same questions repeatedly)
• Finance-friendly reporting (clean visibility into spend and ROI)
• Flexibility to adjust as your total rewards offerings evolve

Before adding any tool, I always ask:

• What real pain does this solve for HR and the business?
• Who will use this system regularly, and do I need their input?
• Does this reduce admin or add to it?
• Will this still work at 500+ employees?

If the answers aren’t clear, I pause.

What I’d do differently if I were building this tomorrow

I’ve built versions of this HR tech stack that worked beautifully and versions that didn’t. Looking back, the difference wasn’t the tools themselves. It was how thoughtfully we selected and implemented them, how clearly we defined success, and whether we treated vendors as partners or just checked boxes. 

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Define ROI upfront, both qualitative and quantitative.
Time saved, employee usage, reduction in questions, decision speed; know what success looks like before implementation.

Sequence deliberately.
Get your foundation stable before layering on additional tools. You can’t build a performance management strategy on top of unreliable employee data.

Revisit ROI regularly.
If a system isn’t saving time, improving insight, or strengthening employee experience, ask why it’s still there.

Balance scalability with restraint.
Buy for where you’re going, but don’t overbuild for a future that’s still hypothetical.

Bring Finance and IT in earlier.
It saves money, rework, and credibility later. They’ll catch integration issues and budget realities you might miss.

Negotiate like a partner, not a buyer.
Don’t just accept the first proposal. Ask about cost flexibility, what features might be available as add-ons (now or later), and what post-implementation support actually looks like (response times, dedicated account management, training resources). The best vendor relationships are built on clarity upfront, not surprises six months in.

Let AI inform priorities, not distract you.
Ask hard questions about data protection, how information is used, and whether it actually makes life easier and reduces bias or just introduces new risks.

Don’t skip change management.
Even great tools fail if no one uses them. Implementation isn’t just turning the system on; it’s communication, training, and making sure it sticks.

The goal isn’t the biggest stack. It’s the right one.

Final thoughts

This stage of growth is demanding, and the stakes are real. But it’s also where HR has the chance to evolve from “keeping things running” to building systems that actually enable performance and long-term growth.

If you’re navigating this transition now, you’re not behind; you’re exactly where you should be. And with the right foundation, you’ll give yourself room to breathe, grow, and actually lead.

The post HR Tech Stack for Midsize Companies: What I’d Build at 200–300 Employees appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Theresa Fesinstine

Theresa Fesinstine is a 25-year HR executive and founder of peoplepower.ai, a leading education platform helping HR leaders confidently adopt and apply AI at work. She is the author of People Powered by AI: A Playbook for HR Leaders Ready to Shape the Future of Work, a practical guide to integrating ethical, strategic, and human-centered AI into People and Culture teams.

She also writes People Power Pulse, a LinkedIn newsletter followed by 6,000+ HR professionals, and serves as an adjunct professor at The City College of New York, teaching AI in Business and HR Management.

Across her work as an educator, advisor, and keynote speaker, Theresa is guided by one question: how do we build a future of work that is people-first and AI-forward? She helps HR teams navigate transformation with clarity, confidence, and a commitment to culture.

Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn.

There is a shift happening in the workplace, but it is not showing up neatly in engagement scores or quarterly dashboards. It is quieter than that, more personal, and often harder to name. You can feel it in the growing gap between what people experience outside of work and what they are still expected to tolerate once they log in.

It shows up in small moments that, taken alone, might seem insignificant. A team member growing impatient with the slow cadence of internal approvals. A high performer wondering why they are still manually searching for development opportunities when consumer platforms seem to anticipate their needs without being asked. A new hire, already frustrated that getting a simple answer from HR requires navigating three tools, two time zones, and a lot of guesswork.

What sits underneath these moments is not laziness or entitlement, and it is not a lack of effort from HR teams. It is something more structural. Employee expectations are no longer shaped primarily by work itself. They are being shaped by the technologies people live with every day, and increasingly, by AI-enabled systems that quietly redefine what feels reasonable.

In my work advising HR and People teams navigating AI adoption, I see this gap emerge not from resistance, but from uncertainty about how to lead with care.

The expectation gap most organizations misread

In conversations with HR and People leaders, I often hear a familiar skepticism. It usually sounds measured and well-intentioned. “We’re not sure our people are ready for this.” Or, “We don’t want to depersonalize the employee experience.”

Those concerns make sense on the surface, but they are built on a false premise. Employees are not encountering AI for the first time at work. They are already using it daily. At home. On their phones. Increasingly, in their workflows, whether or not their organization has formally acknowledged it.

What employees are asking for is not unrestricted technology or blind adoption. They are asking for clarity and care. They want to understand how AI is being used, where it fits, and how it supports them rather than quietly evaluating them. When organizations hesitate, it is often framed as protection. But when that hesitation turns into gatekeeping, it creates a different risk. People start experimenting on their own, without shared guardrails, and the organization loses the opportunity to design trust intentionally.

The idea that AI will dehumanize HR also misses what is actually happening. AI does not remove humanity from people systems. It exposes where humanity has been stretched too thin or deprioritized. If the employee experience already feels fragmented, slow, or transactional, AI will not cause that problem; it will make it more visible. It will raise the standard for what “support” looks like, and it will surface where HR is carrying more load than it should without the infrastructure to match.

So the question is not whether AI belongs in HR and EX. The more honest question is this: How do we design empathy at scale, inside systems that were never built to deliver it?

What quiet AI adoption actually looks like inside real organizations

The most meaningful AI-enabled changes rarely look like transformation programs. They look like relief: Less manual work. Fewer dead ends. Faster access to answers. Earlier signals. Better conversations.

At peoplepower.ai, we have had the privilege of walking alongside HR and EX teams as they explore what responsible adoption can actually look like, in the messiness of real organizations.

In one midsize company, we helped reimagine their engagement analysis process using natural language processing. What once took six weeks of spreadsheet wrangling and manual theme coding now takes hours. That time was not just saved; it was redeployed into higher-value employee focused work, including listening circles, manager enablement, and deeper cultural diagnostics. The win was not efficiency. The win was capacity, and what that capacity made possible.

In another case, a global client used predictive tools to surface early burnout signals within a customer care team. The important detail is what happened next. They did not issue a blanket mandate or roll out another generic well-being campaign. They equipped managers with context, training, and language so they could respond in a way that felt human rather than performative. What followed was not just a reduction in burnout indicators. It was an increase in trust, because employees felt seen earlier and supported more consistently.

These are not flashy AI stories that depend on novelty. They are real examples of teams exploring what is possible with care, enabled by technology and expressed through humans. That is the pattern worth paying attention to.

How HR leaders can respond without losing the plot

One of the biggest risks right now is that HR gets pulled into the wrong kind of urgency. The market wants strategies, platforms, and roadmaps. Vendors want use cases. Leaders want quick wins. Meanwhile, employees want something simpler and harder at the same time. They want work to feel less frustrating. They want support to feel more accessible. They want systems to feel like they were designed for humans.

HR teams do not need another AI strategy deck. We need grounded, human-first actions that help HR teams move forward without creating fear, confusion, or unintended harm.

Final thought: The future is being built in the background.

Most organizations that will lead the next decade of employee experience will not do it through big headlines or massive overhauls. They will do it in the quiet redesign of how care is delivered at work. They will notice where employees lose time. They will fix the handoffs that create frustration. They will build systems that surface answers and signals sooner. They will equip managers to respond like humans, not policy enforcers.

They will also be honest about what AI is doing, what it is not doing, and where accountability sits. Because trust does not come from pretending technology is neutral. It comes from clarity, consistency, and the willingness to center dignity as much as efficiency.

At the end of the day, AI will not define the future of employee experience. People will. The leaders who hold both the technology and humanity with intention are the ones designing workplaces worth staying for.

The post The Future of Employee Experience: How AI Is Quietly Rewriting What Workers Expect appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Holly Hazelton

Holly Hazelton is a people-focused content and communications leader with more than 10 years of experience supporting HR, benefits, coaching, and people analytics audiences. She has shaped employee experience narratives and content strategies for Workhuman, Crunchr, and AceUp, helping leaders create workplaces where people feel seen, supported, and connected. She also founded a global ERG for working parents, reflecting her belief that human-centered storytelling drives stronger performance and belonging.

Connect with Holly on LinkedIn.

This past August, my world was shattered when I got a call that my mom had fallen in the middle of the night. I immediately drove into Boston — half asleep and half in shock — and when I arrived, she was going into emergency brain surgery. My mom was having a hemorrhagic stroke. 

I didn’t realize it then, but this wouldn’t be her last hospital stay.

That was the day I unexpectedly joined the sandwich generation. It’s a somewhat endearing term for those of us who are simultaneously raising children while caring for our aging parents. 

There aren’t as many of us in this club as there are people who enjoy eating sandwiches, but still, we make up nearly 25% of U.S. adults. Plus, 71% of employees today have some form of caregiving responsibility. That includes childcare, elder care, medical coordination, household management, and unpaid labor.

Luckily for me, I was working part-time during the early days of my mom’s stroke and had the flexibility to support my family fully. Had I been working full-time, I would have quickly exhausted paid family leave and PTO while coordinating her care — all while juggling school schedules and the everyday logistics of parenting young children. Even so, there were some days I didn’t make it home in time to get them off the bus. 

I was stretched thin. 

When caregiving becomes a workplace issue

My experience isn’t an isolated one, and it reflects a reality many employers are already navigating. When caregiving responsibilities collide with full-time work, the effects extend beyond the individual employee and into day-to-day business operations.

Caregiving can cost employers $6,410 per employee per year in productivity loss, and employees who are caregivers miss an average of 3.2 workdays per month.

For HR leaders, this raises a pressing question: how can employers support the sandwich generation in a way that meaningfully reduces strain, without adding administrative burden or unpredictable costs?

One of the most practical options is caregiving stipends. These are a type of family stipend that employers can offer employees to support family members. Other types of family stipends typically include elder care stipends, fertility support, and childcare benefits.

Read ‘’Stipends for Caregiving Employees: Everything You Need to Know’’ to learn more about how to offer caregiver stipends in practice. 

What is an elder care stipend, and how does it work?

An elder care stipend typically rolls into a family stipend. It is a predetermined amount of money an employer provides to employees on a recurring basis to cover approved elder care expenses. 

Caregiving or elder care stipends can be granted monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on your approach to benefits. You can also vary the categories of approved expenses based on your policy. Caregiving stipends can provide a financial safety net for:  

• Medical expenses
• Adult day care
• Children’s day care or babysitting services
• Personal care attendants 
• Transportation costs
• Home modifications or renovations
• Everyday personal needs 
• Household expenses 

The hidden costs of dual caregiving for employees and employers

Caring for even one other person is demanding. When employees are responsible for both children and aging parents, those demands compound quickly and create ripple effects that show up emotionally and operationally.

Sandwich generation employees perform complex, demanding work outside their regular hours, with little support. So it’s no surprise that caregivers are 48% more likely to have experienced increased anxiety and depression over the past year.

Carrying the mental load

Dual caregivers often feel constant worry and anxiety. We make medical decisions with limited context or preparation while assisting with homework or addressing behavior issues in our children. This unavoidable mental load often shows up as burnout, disengagement, or reduced capacity at work.

Financial strain 

Costs for childcare, elder care, transportation, meal support, and medical devices add up fast. Many caregivers pay thousands out of pocket each year, even when insurance or Medicaid covers some costs. Over time, that financial pressure limits employees’ ability to stay fully engaged at work or plan for long-term career growth.

Organizational impact: absenteeism, presenteeism, stalled careers

Many employees, myself included, try to keep caregiving struggles quiet at work, but the impact is felt nonetheless. If your sandwich generation employees feel overworked and underpaid before they even log on, it’s only a matter of time before the business experiences related pressure.

For organizations, the strain of caregiving shows up in measurable ways:

• Higher absenteeism: Working caregivers are twice as likely to take disability-related leaves of absence, and one-third of caregivers who take leave to care for family end up taking another leave for themselves.
• Missed promotions: One in five take demotions or leaves of absence to manage their intense responsibilities.
• Part-time transitions: 29% of caregivers are reducing their work hours.

Despite the growing need to support caregivers, Compt’s Midyear Benchmark Report found that fewer than 4% of companies offer caregiving stipends. This is a significant and surprising gap between employee reality and employer action, considering the number of family caregivers has increased by 45% over the past decade. 

For HR teams, this disconnect should be a wake-up call. Without intentional support, caregiving challenges translate into higher turnover, increased absenteeism, and lower performance and productivity — often long before they show up in engagement surveys or exit interviews.

Why flexible, multiuse stipends solve modern caregiving challenges

Addressing caregiving challenges doesn’t require adding more rigid benefits. Rather, it requires designing support that reflects how caregiving actually works. 

Caregiving needs rarely fit into neat categories. Employees may be supporting aging parents one month, coordinating childcare the next, or managing both at the same time. That variability makes rigid, single-purpose benefits ineffective and difficult to manage. This is where targeted family care stipends — or better yet, a flexible, single Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) — come in. 

Unlike point solutions, with an LSA, employees can move between caregiving needs as their situations change:

• Childcare
• Elder care
• Transportation
• Groceries
• Visiting Nurse assistance
• Tutoring
• Wellness support

Other caregiving-related categories may apply here, depending on your team’s unique needs and how you structure your program. 

When my mom first went into the hospital in Boston, my expenses were primarily travel costs, lunches for myself and my father, and after-school care for when I couldn’t be there for my children. Upon returning home, we needed help purchasing sheets, blankets, and accessibility upgrades.

This is why flexible LSAs are so effective: they provide employees with direct support where it’s needed most, month by month, without forcing them into predefined categories that fail to reflect real life.

For HR, flexibility matters, too. LSAs reduce the need to juggle multiple point solutions or define numerous family scenarios. This makes it easier to offer solid benefits without adding operational complexity, and it trickles down to employees like me.

There’s also a generational aspect to all of this. Mercer uncovered that Gen Z and millennials want digital-first tools, personalized options, and flexible benefits, and when the benefits don’t address real needs, it can erode trust. Flexible stipends help close the trust gap by giving employees more choice rather than limited options.

The business case for supporting the sandwich generation

Supporting employees who are caregivers is a human decision — but it’s also a strategic one. When caregivers receive even modest levels of support, research shows the benefits extend beyond employee well-being to workforce stability, cost control, and better long-term performance.

Mercer’s CFO survey highlights why caregiving support aligns directly with finance leaders’ top concerns:

• 67% of CFOs view healthcare costs as a major concern.
• High-cost claimants are the #1 driver of increasing cost volatility.
• 72% say healthcare is less predictable than other expenses.

Caregiving support plays an important role here because it helps reduce disruptions that drive cost volatility, such as sudden leaves, burnout-related exits, and delayed care, which can lead to higher-cost health claims in the future.

As the workforce ages and healthcare costs continue to rise, the risk of inaction becomes harder to ignore. The sandwich generation is growing, and fewer families have access to affordable private care. This increases the likelihood that caregiving responsibilities will fall directly on your employees. 

Employers that fail to adapt risk compounding these pressures over time, particularly among experienced, mid-career employees who are hardest to replace.

In contrast, organizations that invest in flexible, modern caregiving support are better positioned to retain critical talent, plan benefits spending with greater confidence, and continue to innovate. For many organizations, especially midmarket companies, this shift isn’t theoretical. It’s here, and it’s already shaping how benefits strategies are evolving.

How midmarket companies are integrating family care reimbursements into broader benefits strategies

Among midmarket employers, caregiving support is increasingly being addressed through broader, more flexible benefits strategies rather than standalone solutions. Instead of adding more vendors, these organizations are using flexible stipends to consolidate support across caregiving, wellness, and everyday needs and drive a more holistic and manageable benefits strategy. 

Simply put, caregiver support isn’t just for large companies. 

Compt’s Annual Benchmark Report highlights how this approach is taking shape in the midmarket:

• 64% of employers offer all-inclusive LSAs (not just siloed categories), reflecting how midmarket organizations are consolidating support into broader, more flexible programs rather than adding new vendors.
• Average stipend funding reached $850 per employee in 2025, while midmarket employers averaged $1,055 per employee, demonstrating how midsize organizations are refining existing stipends to support multiple use cases and deliver holistic support in a predictable, manageable way.

Why leaders at midsize companies choose LSAs

LSAs have become a central organizing layer for modern benefits programs at many midsize organizations. Instead of adding new benefits each year, companies can use LSAs as a central hub for all types of benefits. This approach helps HR:

• Consolidate vendors. One platform can replace several separate solutions.
• Lower administrative workload. HR teams often lack time for manual reviews or managing specialized programs.
• Forecast budget needs for Finance. LSAs avoid unpredictable claims, unlike expanding medical or EAP programs.

Plus, this flexible, trust-based strategy grows with employee needs, which is especially important for those in the sandwich generation.

The takeaway for HR and Finance teams? Flexibility doesn’t have to mean complexity. For midmarket employers, it often has the opposite effect.

How to design a caregiving or elder care stipend that cuts down admin work

Once an organization decides to support caregivers more intentionally, the next question is how to do so without adding administrative burden. Benefits programs don’t fail because of poor design; it’s because too many rely on manual workflows, fragile spreadsheets, disconnected systems, and tools that weren’t built to handle stipends at scale. 

Simply put, even the best-laid benefits plans can go awry without the right system in place.

Luckily, whether you’re looking to offer a single caregiving stipend or a holistic Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA), Compt can help transform your benefits while cutting down on admin work. Compt’s flexible employee stipends help you:

• Design a customized, easy-to-modify plan including spending categories, amounts, and timeframes.
• Automate accurate payments with built-in tax compliance and payroll integrations. 
• Simplify reimbursements by allowing employees to snap a photo of their receipt, upload it to the platform, and submit. 

For an example of how this works in practice, read “How to Set Up an Employee Stipend in Just One Hour.”

Simplify caregiving and family support with Compt

Supporting caregivers should feel authentic, not forced. Have you ever had an experience like mine, where a friend offered to help, but gave strict limitations on what they were willing to do to support you? Of course not, and it should be the same for caregiving stipends. These benefits are meant to help, not hinder, people from accessing the resources they need.  

Compt is designed to help support employees and their families, including employees in the sandwich generation. It offers the flexibility employees demand and the compliance employers expect.

Compt’s LSAs were designed for employers seeking to support families and caregivers without additional administrative work. With flexible categories, employees gain access to benefits for a wide range of needs, ensuring families at every stage can find support that fits their real lives. Plus, Compt’s tax-compliant reimbursement system makes it easy for teams everywhere to access benefits without extra paperwork.

Support your sandwich generation employees with flexible, reimbursement-based LSAs built for real caregiving needs. Schedule a demo with Compt today.

FAQs: Supporting the sandwich generation

The post How to Support the Sandwich Generation With Caregiving and Elder Care Stipends appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Holly Hazelton

Holly Hazelton is a people-focused content and communications leader with more than 10 years of experience supporting HR, benefits, coaching, and people analytics audiences. She has shaped employee experience narratives and content strategies for Workhuman, Crunchr, and AceUp, helping leaders create workplaces where people feel seen, supported, and connected. She also founded a global ERG for working parents, reflecting her belief that human-centered storytelling drives stronger performance and belonging.

Connect with Holly on LinkedIn.

Across organizations, HR, Finance, and Total Rewards leaders continue to face a persistent question: how to evaluate the ROI of employee benefits in a way that feels credible to the business.

When these leaders talk candidly about employee benefits ROI, two important truths surface. First, ROI looks different across companies. Some teams prioritize cost control, others prioritize growth — and each requires a different lens. Second, tying benefits to exact dollar returns is inherently difficult. As one Director of Total Rewards put it, benefits ROI often feels like “fuzzy math,” especially when it’s framed as a precise dollar-for-dollar return.

This guide offers a practical framework for measuring the aspects of employee benefits ROI that are both credible and defensible, grounded in candid conversations the Compt team had with five HR and Total Rewards leaders who navigate these tradeoffs every day.

It is designed specifically for HR and Total Rewards leaders who need to make a clear, Finance-ready case for discretionary perks and lifestyle benefits. No complex tools, advanced modeling, or speculative assumptions required.

Executive summary: Measuring employee benefits ROI

When evaluating employee benefits ROI, focus on:

• Cost efficiency: Reduce vendors and unused spend
• Participation and utilization: Prove employees actually use the benefit
• Operational simplification: Save HR and Payroll teams time and headaches
• Directional business impact: Monitor retention and absenteeism trends

Finance leaders prefer trend data and measurable efficiency over speculative ROI claims.

What is employee benefits ROI?

Employee benefits ROI refers to the measurable business value generated relative to the cost of a benefits program, including cost savings, operational efficiency, participation, and directional workforce outcomes.

For HR practitioners and people leaders, employee benefits play a central role in how supported employees feel at work. According to Gartner, only 45% of employees believe their organization cares about their personal well-being. That means more than half of employees feel burned out, disengaged, or disconnected from company leadership.

The right well-being benefits influence outcomes like retention, productivity, and absenteeism, but those impacts rarely show up as clean line items on a balance sheet. The challenge, then, is translating those outcomes into an ROI story Finance can evaluate with confidence.

How to assess ROI on employee benefits programs

At its core, ROI helps assess whether the money invested in a program appears to deliver business value relative to its cost. HR teams can calculate ROI in two ways: anticipated or actual ROI.

Your basic ROI formula should look like this: 

ROI = (Total benefits – total investment) / total investment × 100

This formula is commonly used across HR initiatives, including benefits programs, but it’s best framed as a directional tool rather than a precise calculation. For this guide, we’ll focus on how to use it to measure employee benefits ROI on stipends and Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs).

What do CFOs care about when it comes to employee perks and benefits?

When CFOs evaluate employee perks and discretionary benefits, they typically focus on five core questions:

1. Cost control: Is spend predictable and defensible?
2. Waste reduction: Are we paying for benefits employees actually use?
3. Operational efficiency: Does this reduce unnecessary vendors, manual processing, or administrative headaches and overhead?
4. Risk exposure: Are tax handling and compliance clear and consistent?
5. Competitive positioning: Does this help us attract and retain talent without escalating costs?

Unlike HR, CFOs rarely evaluate benefits based on sentiment alone. They want to see structured reporting, participation data, utilization rates, and evidence that the program is either replacing existing costs or reducing future risk (such as turnover).

This is why participation, utilization, and vendor consolidation often matter more in ROI conversations than abstract engagement scores.

6 ways to measure the ROI of LSAs and stipends

Wondering which metrics help finance prove ROI when you replace point-solution perks with a single lifestyle benefits wallet?

These six metrics reflect the most practical ways HR and Finance teams assess employee benefits ROI on discretionary perks and lifestyle benefits, ordered from the most concrete and easiest to defend to more directional signals that add context over time.

1. Cost efficiency

Cost efficiency is the most straightforward way to talk about employee benefits ROI with Finance because it aligns well with what they already care about: reducing waste and improving budget predictability.

Look for signs that your lifestyle benefits program helps you:

• Reduce waste from unused perks, breakage, one-off swag purchases, or “set it and forget it” benefits
• Retire underused tools or overlapping vendor programs; consolidate invoices
• Improve budget visibility and forecasting
• Free up HR time for higher-impact work by reducing manual processing and tax guesswork

For many CFOs, predictability matters more than raw cost reduction. A stable, forecastable benefits line item is often preferable to volatile discretionary spend.

You can also quantify time savings from streamlined processes. For example, if your team spends hours each month tracking which benefits are taxable vs. nontaxable, log that time, multiply it by your internal hourly cost, and track the reduction after centralizing administration. That becomes a concrete, defensible ROI input.

What this may look like in practice: 

• Replace 5-12 perk vendors with one clean stipend budget.
• Result: Fewer invoices. One payroll integration. One set of policy rules.
  • CFO summary: Consolidation reduces administrative burden, saves us time, and improves budget predictability.

According to Compt’s 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report, small companies (fewer than 100 employees) invest an average of $1,675 per employee on stipends. That’s more than double what large enterprises spend. This means cost efficiency is even more important for smaller teams.

Once you’ve framed efficiency, the next most CFO-friendly ROI argument is risk: What happens if your benefits fall behind the market?

2. Competitive positioning and benefits FOMO

Competitive positioning is one of the clearest ways to frame employee benefits ROI. If your benefits don’t meet market expectations, the cost shows up fast: roles become harder to fill, fewer candidates accept offers, and you experience higher attrition from previously dedicated employees. 

Beyond this, nothing activates the executive team’s emotional brain more than hearing competitors are outcompeting them, and it often results in swift approvals for your request.

Start by identifying the employers you compete with for the same talent, then compare their benefits offerings against your own package. If they offer benefits that you don’t, pressure-test whether your employees (and candidates) actually care about those perks.

Competitive benchmarks show what candidates expect, while your own employees reveal what truly makes a difference for them.

These patterns also explain why flexible, multicategory benefits like stipends and LSAs tend to outperform narrow, vendor-based perks: they help you stay competitive without constantly adding another tool.

Once you’ve established that a benefit is competitive, Finance will ask the next obvious question: Are employees actually using it?

3. Participation rates

Participation rate reflects how many employees use a benefit in a given time period. It’s often the simplest way to show whether a program is reaching your workforce at all.

To calculate participation, divide the number of employees who used the benefit during a specific period by your total number of employees.

For example:

• 500 employees
• 50 use the benefit each month 
• 50 / 500 = 10% participation

Depending on the benefit you’re reviewing, 10% might be great — but it also might be low. For a benefit like tuition reimbursement, that may be high enough. However, for programs focused on wellness initiatives, it would be considered low. It’s important to keep the specific fringe benefit’s goal in mind, as well as look for industry benchmarks to know if/where there is room for improvement.

Here’s what this may look like before and after LSA launch:

• Participation rate: 32% before LSA launch →  91%+ (Compt benchmark) after. 
• Higher adoption across all demographics and departments.
  • CFO summary: High participation indicates the benefit is relevant and not wasted spend.

Tools to measure participation:

• A simple spreadsheet
• HRIS reimbursement data
• Industry benchmarks for similar employers
• Compt’s Current Team Engagement YTD report, which shows the percentage of employees who have used their stipend at least once this year

Participation tells you who is using the benefit. Utilization tells you whether the money you allocated is actually being spent.

4. Utilization rates 

Utilization rates are most useful for stipends and LSAs because employee spending amounts are fixed. Utilization shows how much of your allocated benefits budget employees actually use.

• Participation = how many employees engage with a benefit
• Utilization = how much of the allocated dollars are actually spent

A simple utilization formula looks like this:

Utilization rate = actual amount spent / total amount available

Example:

• $150,000 allocated for an annual wellness stipend (500 employees × $300 per year)
• $98,000 reimbursed to employees
• $98,000 / $150,000 = 65% utilization

This means employees used 65% of the dollars the company set aside for wellness.

Utilization can also be seasonal or situational. You might find that:

• Wellness categories are consistently used more than narrower perks like tuition reimbursement because they support a wider range of employees.
• Caregiving or family support categories see higher usage during specific seasons.
• Food or commuter categories rise during return-to-office periods.
  • CFO summary: Category spend shows what employees value and how benefits support real-life needs.

Where to find utilization data:

• Manual category tagging
• HRIS exports
• Compt’s Stipend Usage Month Over Month report, which provides a quick snapshot of trends

Once you have participation and utilization, Finance will usually ask for the harder question: what business outcomes do these benefits influence?

5. Business outcomes

Beyond sentiment and usage data, Finance typically looks for signals tied to business performance. Lifestyle benefits can influence outcomes such as absenteeism, retention and turnover, productivity, and performance indicators, but it is important to treat these as directional, not purely attributable.

Start by pulling business metrics you likely already track, including:

• Absenteeism trends
• Turnover and retention rates
• Performance and pulse survey results
• One-on-one manager feedback and recurring performance review themes
• Team-level productivity indicators your organization already uses

The goal is not to claim a single benefit caused a specific outcome. Instead, connect the dots between usage, employee feedback, and directional movement in the metrics that matter to your business.

Directional patterns HR teams sometimes observe:

• Customer Support turnover: 18% before launch → 12% after launch. 
• Engineering turnover: 9% before launch → 6% after launch.
• Greatest improvements among caregivers and early career talent (demographic insights).
  • CFO summary: If retention improves among high-cost roles, replacement costs may decrease over time.*

*While these are great numbers to have available, keep in mind that some CFOs might consider them fuzzy math. Factors that can impact turnover vary widely, from improved manager training to greater clarity on company goals to the company simply performing better.

That said, even when benefits influence these outcomes, Finance still needs to understand whether the program is efficient relative to its cost. This is why participation, utilization, and cost efficiency should sit at the center of your ROI story.

Finally, layer in engagement data to add context: it helps explain why participation and outcomes may be moving.

6. Employee engagement

Employee engagement is one of the most common metrics leaders review when evaluating benefits, but it is best used as supporting evidence rather than the foundation of your ROI story. Engagement data can strengthen your narrative when it aligns with participation, utilization, and cost efficiency trends.

Here’s a simple way to measure it:

• Pull a baseline engagement score from your HRIS or quarterly employee surveys (e.g., eNPS).
• Add a simple pulse-check question to your next survey (e.g., “Do you feel supported by our fringe/discretionary/perks benefits?”).
• Compare before-and-after results following the launch of your LSA.
• Look for trends across teams or demographics.
• Review related metrics, such as retention and turnover rates, and use exit feedback to understand what’s driving employee departures. 

If you see an engagement lift after launching a lifestyle stipend or LSA, call it out as a corroborating signal — especially when it matches what you see in participation and utilization.

What an engagement shift may look like:

• Pulse survey question: “Do you feel supported by our benefits?”
  • Pre-LSA responses: 46% yes
  • Six months after launch: 72% yes
    • CFO summary: Higher engagement signals stronger productivity, morale, and day-to-day performance.

Of course, you can track any of these metrics manually in Excel, but you can save a tremendous amount of admin time and headaches by simplifying these processes in a single system like Compt. 

Curious about how to use this type of data to evaluate the effectiveness of your benefits? Check out the Compt guide, “When to Reevaluate Your Employee Benefits: 6 Signs Your Program Needs a Refresh.”

Which benefit categories see the highest ROI?

The employee benefits categories that see the highest ROI are those that combine broad participation, predictable spend, and measurable operational efficiency.

In Compt’s 2026 benchmark data, all-inclusive LSAs reached 91%+ participation across customer programs — significantly higher than most single-category vendor perks.

Not all employee benefits deliver the same measurable impact. Some categories consistently outperform others by driving higher participation, more efficient spend, and clearer links to business outcomes. These high-ROI categories have one thing in common: they support real-life needs, not one-size-fits-all perks.

Learn more in our:

• What Is a Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA)? 2026 Employee Benefits Guide
• Ultimate List of Employee Stipend Statistics (2026): Adoption, Funding, Participation, and Usage
• 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report

Why these categories outperform one-size-fits-all vendors

High-ROI benefits categories tend to share three traits:

1. Flexibility: More employees can use them.
2. Relevance: They solve immediate, real-life needs.
3. Ease of use: Low friction makes participation more likely.

Because no two employees are the same, flexible lifestyle benefits tend to deliver stronger and more measurable ROI than narrow, vendor-based perks.

From a Finance perspective, these categories outperform others because they reduce waste, consolidate vendors, and make participation and spend easy to track.

When low usage signals it’s time to consolidate perks

Utilization data doesn’t just show what’s working — it also highlights when a benefits strategy needs to change. Low usage is one of the clearest indicators that it’s time to move toward a unified LSA or multicategory stipend. When employees barely touch their perks, it often signals a deeper disconnect between benefits design and employee needs.

What low usage usually means:

• Misalignment: The perk doesn’t reflect employee needs or values.
• Waste: Dollars sit unused quarter after quarter.
• Platform fatigue: Too many tools and hoops to jump through.
• Admin drag: HR maintains multiple vendors with limited impact.
• Opaque data: Finance lacks clear visibility into usage and spend.

By centralizing all lifestyle perks into one predictable line item, HR can reduce waste and simplify its benefits structure. According to Compt’s 2026 Annual Benchmark Report, 64% of companies now offer all-inclusive LSAs for these reasons: to reduce vendor sprawl, increase utilization, and simplify reporting.

With this model, usage rises (Compt customers average 91%+ participation), spend becomes more predictable, and Finance gains a more centralized view of participation, investment, and category-level usage.

How Compt makes employee benefits ROI easier to see

Measuring employee benefits ROI can be simple. When you focus on the fundamentals like cost efficiency, competitive positioning, participation, utilization, business impact, and engagement, you get a clear view of what is working and what employees genuinely value. 

LSAs naturally make participation and cost efficiency easier to track. Compt simplifies this further by centralizing reporting, reducing manual work, and improving visibility into how employees use their stipends. HR leaders can then use platform insights (such as participation, category-level usage, and the simple fact of having all your lifestyle benefits in one place) to support ROI conversations with Finance.

Ready to see how this looks in practice? Request a Compt demo today.

FAQs: ROI of lifestyle benefits and discretionary perks 

Below are the most common questions CFOs and HR leaders ask when evaluating employee benefits ROI.

The post How to Measure Employee Benefits ROI: Advice From 5 HR and Total Rewards Leaders appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Turiya Gray

Turiya Gray is a dynamic HR executive with 20+ years of experience building workplaces where people and performance actually thrive. Turiya is obsessed with making work better for everyone and known for her sharp insights, impactful leadership, and passion for helping organizations get people and culture right. She is also the cohost of the top-rated HR unConfidential podcast that launched in 2018. Currently, Turiya serves as Senior Partner & Fractional Chief People Officer at FXG Partners, partnering with midsize companies to deliver thoughtful, high-impact HR leadership.

Connect with Turiya on LinkedIn.

I’m sure many of my HR friends remember what was happening in the workplace in summer 2021: COVID uncertainty, remote-work fatigue, burnout everywhere. Employee well-being had officially shifted from “nice to have” to “business critical,” and the Great Resignation was prompting every company to rethink how they attracted, retained, and meaningfully supported their people.

I stepped into the Chief People Officer role at a 300-person HR technology software firm in the midst of this “unprecedented time” with all things Total Rewards at the top of my priority list. While our long-term work included building a clear rewards philosophy, modernizing compensation, and evolving benefits, I quickly realized we had a more immediate opportunity: our employee perks.

Like many companies, we offered perks that were well-intentioned but we questioned whether they were the right investments for our people. So instead of tweaking around the edges, we chose to start fresh by grounding everything in empathy, strategy, and real data.

Starting where every good HR project starts: with the truth

Before we could introduce anything new, we needed an unfiltered view of what already existed. Too often, HR teams jump straight to solutions, but without the truth, you end up solving the wrong problem.

We began by mapping our current perks ecosystem end-to-end to better understand what we offered, who actually used it, what it cost, and how easy (or not) it was to administer. We discovered that many of our current perks were underutilized, misaligned, or simply too complicated to be worth the effort.

This data told us what was happening, but now we needed to know why. So we went straight to the source, our employees, to get their feedback and help on shaping the path forward. 

Our incredible People Ops Director at the time led a companywide perks survey asking employees what they valued, what they could live without, and what they wished we offered. We also sat down with our ERGs to better understand unique needs across identities and lived experiences, because “one-size-fits-all” never actually fits anyone.

Within weeks, we had a clearer picture of what mattered most to our employees. They wanted perks that offered flexibility, aligned with their actual lives, and were clear and accessible.

Building something better — and more human

Armed with these insights from employees, we set out to rebuild a perks program that truly worked for our people and for the business. 

Our goal was simple but ambitious: design a program that reflected our values, aligned with our newly crafted Total Rewards philosophy, supported diverse needs, and could scale alongside the company. Equally important? It had to be much easier for our Benefits Manager to administer (more on this below!).

Here’s where we landed:

• We evolved some existing perks. Our home-office stipend was revamped, we added tuition reimbursement to our learning and development stipend, and we expanded our family planning support and family concierge services. We also expanded our gender-affirming care stipend to better meet the needs of eligible employees.
• We offered some new options. We introduced a wellness/fitness stipend and a therapy stipend. One key learning was that having a standalone therapy stipend was important to our employees. Culturally, it sent a message that employees wouldn’t have to choose between using the wellness stipend for a gym membership or therapy — they could do both. Operationally, it mitigated potential barriers to access to mental health support for employees who wanted to reduce their out-of-pocket costs.
• We thought beyond the stipends. In addition to financial-based stipends, the feedback from employees elevated a need for more holistic well-being support. We introduced monthly self-care days and no-meeting Fridays as a starting point to address some of the things that were impacting employee productivity and morale.

After crunching the numbers and securing buy-in from other execs, it was time to put our new program into action. This included the critical step of solving for ease of use and administration.

Enter Compt — our secret weapon

Designing the right perks program was only half the challenge. The other half that every HR leader knows all too well is making sure the program could actually run without burning out our People team and confusing employees.

Our Benefits Manager was (and still is) an absolute rockstar: service-oriented, committed to a top-notch employee experience, and has never met a challenge she wouldn’t tackle head-on. However, she had too many manual tasks to manage. Things like verifying receipts, untangling spreadsheets, and chasing the never-ending “Where do I submit this?” questions were taking up a lot of her time. 

We needed a way to administer the perks program that was flexible, compliant, easy for employees to navigate, and met the needs of our program administrators and friends in Finance. This is where Compt was a lifesaver!

After researching a few tools, we landed on Compt because it offered exactly what we needed: an employee lifestyle benefits platform that allowed us to:

• Set up multiple stipends, each with its own amount, cadence, and eligibility criteria.
• Vastly improve the employee experience with visibility into exactly what was available to them, what they’d submitted throughout the year, and balances they should be sure to use before any cut-off dates. It also created a smooth submission process — no more hunting for forms!
• Ensure compliance and protect employee privacy, especially for sensitive categories like mental health.
• Easily track real-time utilization (with some amazing, detailed reports) so we could monitor the effectiveness of our new program on an ongoing basis.
• Provide our Finance friends visibility into utilization and spend so budgets can be monitored and updated accordingly.
• Eliminate manual approvals with automated workflows that would scale with us as the company grew.

The outcome? Employees loved the flexibility. Finance appreciated the accuracy and transparency. Our Benefits Manager loved the administrative simplicity and the tons of time she got back!

Compt helped us take a human-centered perks strategy and operationalize it in a modern, scalable, data-driven way. It was the right strategy and the right system working together.

What I learned

Rebuilding a perks program in the midst of workplace disruption confirmed for me the power of human-centered design and that companies should do their best to meet people where they are. When you strip away assumptions and actually listen, employees will tell you exactly what they need. When you pair that insight with flexible, well-designed, well-administered programs, the results are undeniable.

Companies and HR/Total Rewards leaders are navigating rising costs (e.g., healthcare and other operational costs), which means every investment has to be the right one. Perks can’t be viewed as just the “extras” off to the side that go unmanaged and unmonitored until it’s time to cut costs. They must be strategic and responsive to your unique business and employee needs in a way that strengthens trust, culture, and performance.

If you’re rethinking how to design perks that actually work for your people and your HR team, request a demo to see how Compt makes flexible, human-centered benefits easy to run.

Want more customer input? View all of Compt’s case studies.

The post Why I Chose Compt for Our Employee Perks Program appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Theresa Fesinstine

Theresa Fesinstine is a 25-year HR executive and founder of peoplepower.ai, a leading education platform helping HR leaders confidently adopt and apply AI at work. She is the author of People Powered by AI: A Playbook for HR Leaders Ready to Shape the Future of Work, a practical guide to integrating ethical, strategic, and human-centered AI into People and Culture teams.

She also writes People Power Pulse, a LinkedIn newsletter followed by 6,000+ HR professionals, and serves as an adjunct professor at The City College of New York, teaching AI in Business and HR Management.

Across her work as an educator, advisor, and keynote speaker, Theresa is guided by one question: how do we build a future of work that is people-first and AI-forward? She helps HR teams navigate transformation with clarity, confidence, and a commitment to culture.

Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn.

“Can I ask you something without sounding dumb?”

That’s how a lot of conversations with HR leaders start these days. I hear it during workshops, after keynotes, at my monthly AI Quick Clinics, and in DMs from people who’ve been leading culture and talent for decades.

They’re not unsure about HR. They’re unsure about AI. They don’t know how to start or what to trust, and many of them already feel behind.

What follows is a version of what I’ve shared in those off-mic, off-stage conversations. These aren’t curated answers from a product sheet or vendor deck. They come from my own work as an AI for HR Educator on a mission to help HR teams explore, adopt, and operationalize AI through a people-first, AI-forward approach.

1. “How do I start using AI if I’m not technical?”

The biggest misconception I see is the idea that there are some magical technical requirements to use AI that HR leaders don’t have. This may have been the case seven years ago when I was stuck  in a General Assembly course trying to learn Tableau, but today it’s different. 

Leveraging AI is a leadership skill now — not a coding one. You don’t need to become an engineer. You need to become fluent in understanding what you need and asking for AI to assist the work you already do.

The fastest way to build confidence is to use AI on tasks you already know how to do and evaluate the results. Draft a job description using your preferred structure, then ask your Generative AI (GenAI) tool of choice (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, etc.) to generate a version based on it. Compare the two. Ask it to summarize a policy, prep notes for a stay interview, or analyze feedback from an exit survey. This is how you begin to understand how the tool “thinks.”

When I lead safe-to-learn sessions with HR teams, we’re not starting with tech. We’re starting with use cases. People quickly realize that AI isn’t taking their work, but it has the potential to make parts of it lighter. That’s where the confidence comes in: not from mastering the tool, but from seeing where it can make space for deeper, more meaningful work.

2. “What AI tools are actually safe, compliant, and HR-ready?”

There’s a lot of noise in the market right now, and HR leaders are understandably cautious. Every day, a new tool claims to “revolutionize HR,” but not every tool is compliant, secure, or actually built with people in mind.

Here’s the framework I offer:

• Separate experimentation from enterprise. ChatGPT might be your go-to tool for quick drafts or brainstorming, but unless you are on a team or enterprise account, it’s not built for sensitive employee data. 
• When evaluating HR tech vendors, ask better questions. Don’t just ask “Do you use AI?” Ask:
  • How is your AI trained and tested for bias?
  • Can you explain how decisions are made (transparency)?
  • What data is retained and how is it secured?
  • Are you embedding AI in workflows, or layering it on top?
  • How are you trained internally to leverage AI?

If they don’t have clear answers (or worse, if they can’t explain it in plain language), it’s a red flag. Stand firm that you need tools that align with your ethical standards, your regulatory responsibilities, and the trust employees place in you.

3. “How do I make sure AI doesn’t replace the human parts of HR?”

The fear isn’t just job loss. It’s culture loss. It’s the fear that, in the name of speed and efficiency, we’ll lose what makes our workplaces real: trust, conversation, relationships.

What I tell teams is this: AI doesn’t know your culture. You do.

AI can help with workflows, process optimization, summarization, and yes, even complex strategy and decision support. But it doesn’t lead with empathy. It doesn’t ask clarifying questions in a performance conversation. It doesn’t see the nuance in an employee’s shift in tone or expression. It can’t spot culture misalignment in a hiring interview. That’s your domain.

What we can do is use AI to reduce cognitive load and make more space for the emotional labor and leadership that HR excels at. For example: 

• Using AI to draft the framework for onboarding communications gives HRBPs more time to meet with new hires face to face. 
• Letting AI create more dynamic and exciting ways to onboard new employees creates more connected and engaged new hires. 
• Leveraging secure AI tools for engagement survey insights can free up the People Analytics lead to explore root causes more deeply.

It’s not AI or People … it’s both, when you design it that way.

4. “How do I upskill my HR team so we don’t fall behind?”

There’s a quiet but persistent pressure many HR leaders are feeling: the belief that we’re supposed to already have a fully formed AI strategy, and somehow also be ready to teach it to everyone else. That kind of pressure shuts down experimentation before it even starts.

The reality is, technical certifications aren’t a realistic path forward for most HR teams. The time and the workload we all face makes the intensity of this approach daunting. The more effective — and sustainable — approach is building fluency through real-world use. Peer learning. Safe-to-try spaces. Targeted working sessions with experts. Small experiments that create forward motion without overwhelming the team.

That’s the approach I’ve built my own work around, because it mirrors how HR actually learns: by applying tools to people-centered challenges and reflecting in real time. When HR teams create conditions for learning vs. expecting immediate expertise, they not only build capability, they build confidence.

Here’s what I recommend after a foundations workshop:

• Set aside intentional time for hands-on exploration. Start with everyday use cases: prompting for a policy rewrite, role-playing a difficult conversation, or analyzing exit survey themes.
• Create internal AI learning circles. Let small teams test tools together and report back what they learned — what worked, what didn’t, what surprised them.
• Make reflection part of the process. Normalize asking questions and sharing imperfect results. You’re not trying to get it “right.” You’re building the muscle.
• Talk about how AI shows up in your workflow. Don’t treat it as a secret sidekick. Make its presence visible and discuss where it helps.

Leaders often ask, “How do I know if my team is ready?” My response usually sounds more like a challenge: What would it take to make your team feel safe enough to learn this in the open?

5. “How do we use AI ethically, without creating fear or mistrust?”

This is the question behind all the others. And it’s where HR has a uniquely important role to play.

Ethical AI starts with transparency: being clear about how you’re using AI, why, and what it means for employees. That includes training your leaders to answer questions about AI adoption with clarity and empathy.

It also means creating systems for review, escalation, and employee feedback. If you’re using AI to assist with performance reviews, you need human calibration, bias testing, and a way for employees to flag inaccuracies. If you’re using AI in recruiting, you need to audit regularly for fairness and accessibility.

The bigger point here is that AI won’t create or fix your culture. It will amplify what already exists. If your culture is built on fear and opacity, AI will extend that. If it’s built on trust, inclusion, and accountability, AI can support it.

What HR leaders can do now to prepare for 2026

2026 is going to be a turning point. GenAI will be more embedded in workplace tools, employees will be more AI-aware, and expectations will shift from “Should we use AI?” to “Are we using it responsibly?”

Here are six actions HR leaders can take now to stay ahead without rushing the process:

1. Audit your current tools. Identify where AI is already present in your HR tech stack; many vendors are embedding it without fanfare. Ask the hard questions about bias, transparency, and compliance.
2. Build AI literacy into onboarding and manager development. Not just for HR — across the organization. This isn’t optional knowledge anymore.
3. Define your ethical AI principles. If your company values trust, inclusion, and growth, what do those values look like in an AI-powered world? Write it down. Share it. Use it.
4. Start documenting wins and missteps. Keep a shared space for learnings across teams. When AI breaks down, make sure you capture it. These stories will shape your adoption roadmap.
5. Design for trust, not just compliance. Focus on how AI impacts relationships, clarity, and experience. Employees can feel the difference.

Final thought

Every HR leader I’ve spoken with over the past year is navigating some version of the same challenge: how to stay human in the age of systems. I don’t believe we have to choose between people and progress. I believe we can lead both.

If you’re in the early stages of AI adoption, or still unsure where to start, know this: it’s OK to move carefully. And I’m happy to help you along your learning journey! 

And take a breath. … You don’t need to have all the answers. You just need to keep asking the right questions, and bringing your team with you.

The post The 5 Questions HR Leaders Ask Me Most About AI … and My Candid Answers appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Kim Rohrer

Kim Rohrer is a veteran people leader, writer, speaker, and advisor with over 15 years of experience building human-centered cultures at high-growth companies. She is the founder of Patchwork Portfolio, author of the I Care Too Much newsletter, and co-host of the HR Confessions podcast. Today, Kim shapes the future of work through a variety of roles, drawing on her HR strategy and storytelling experience to build cultures worth talking about. Her work ranges from Employee Experience and Employer Brand to Communications and Community.

Connect with Kim on LinkedIn.

Picture this: You’re an HR leader preparing to announce a shiny new perk. Free gym memberships for everyone! A meditation app subscription! Maybe even a snack wall if the budget allows!

You hit send on the announcement email, expecting celebration. Instead, you get … crickets. Polite thank-yous, maybe. But engagement falls flat, and your retention numbers? Still not where you want them to be.

Here’s what’s happening: We keep adding perks while people are making hard choices at home about what they can afford, stretching paychecks that haven’t kept pace with rising costs. And a kombucha tap doesn’t pay for childcare.

What if the problem isn’t that we’re not offering enough, but that we’re not offering the right kind of support?

One size fits no one: a total rewards reality 

The economic reality for most workers is brutal. So when your total rewards structure includes a $150 monthly gym membership as a wellness benefit, but your employee is a single father with a 90-minute commute who desperately needs help with childcare? That benefit doesn’t just miss the mark — it highlights how disconnected the company is from his actual life, decreasing trust and tanking engagement. 

Other common mismatches:

• A fancy coffee subscription when someone is struggling to cover groceries
• A meditation app when therapy copays are the real barrier to mental health support
• A professional development budget when student loan payments are crushing them
• An on-site massage chair when they need help paying for gas to get to the office

This isn’t about employees being ungrateful. It’s about benefits that sound good on your careers page but don’t actually help people live their lives. 

And here’s the retention risk: when your benefits feel disconnected from reality, your employees feel unseen. 

The 2025 Gallup Employee Retention and Attraction Report revealed that “Pay/Benefits” is the most frequent reason that Americans are leaving their jobs. Your cash compensation practices matter, yes, but so does the rest of your total rewards strategy. Because people leave when the gap between what you offer and what they need feels too wide to ignore.

How stipends align with talent strategy and retention goals 

This is where Lifestyle Spending Accounts and flexible stipends start to make sense as a part of your overall talent strategy. You don’t have to anticipate every employee’s needs, or even know the often-personal details of their lives that necessitate using specific benefits.

When you give people a stipend, you’re saying: “We trust you to know what support looks like for you.”

Real retention requires more than just flexible benefits, though; it also depends on competitive compensation, work-life balance, career development, and company culture. What people value varies wildly from person to person, and something that seems small might make a lasting impact on someone’s life.

People might use flexible stipends for:

• Commuting costs (e.g., gas, tolls, public transit)
• Childcare or elder care support
• Mental health services not fully covered by insurance
• A home-office setup that actually makes remote work sustainable
• Paying down high-interest debt, such as student loans
• Emergency household expenses that would otherwise go on a credit card

When benefits actually address people’s real needs, they fit into the bigger picture of their holistic employee experience, building more connection to the organization and a higher likelihood of retention.

And this approach helps with recruitment too — candidates can tell the difference between perks theater and a company that’s actually thinking about real life.

What this looks like in practice: from performative perks to benefits that work

If you’re rethinking your benefits strategy with retention in mind, start by asking what people actually need.

Look at your engagement survey results. Review themes from exit interviews and stay conversations. Talk to your managers about what they’re hearing in one-on-ones. You might find that your carefully curated benefits package is solving problems people don’t have, while ignoring the ones keeping them up at night. 

Sometimes low adoption is about the offerings themselves, but often it’s about how benefits are communicated or which groups they resonate with. Maybe a particular demographic really loves one of your benefits, and you could use that story for candidate attraction efforts. Understanding your employees’ experience helps you make better decisions across your talent strategy. 

Once you’ve launched an LSA, the spending data becomes another listening tool. If your team spends stipend money on therapy, that’s a message about mental load. If they spend it on continuing education, that’s hunger for growth. If they spend it on caregiving expenses, that’s data on how your workforce is actually structured. The patterns show you where pressure is building before burnout becomes churn and give you insights into adjusting programs, forecasting needs, and supporting your workforce more proactively.

Think about how flexible stipends fit into your broader compensation philosophy. LSAs aren’t a replacement for fair pay or good health insurance — they’re a supplement that acknowledges people’s lives are different and their needs don’t fit into neat categories.

Tools like Compt make this kind of flexibility manageable. Instead of trying to administer multiple point solutions for different life stages and circumstances, you can offer real choice within a single system.

And yes, there’s ROI here. Losing good people is expensive: recruiting costs, onboarding time, lost productivity, institutional knowledge walking out the door. A flexible benefits approach that improves retention is a cost-effective investment in your talent strategy.

The real strategy: flexible benefits that support whole humans

If you’re struggling with retention, ask yourself: do your benefits match the reality your employees (and prospective employees!) are living in?

The old playbook — more perks! fancier perks! — isn’t working because it was never really about the perks. Retention happens when people feel seen, supported, and trusted. 

And don’t forget the outside world: when candidates peruse your career page, do they see benefits that reflect their needs, or a standard copy-paste job from the latest perks trends? Are you trying to hire specific demographics, or for a diverse team? Does the way you talk about benefits and perks tell that story?

Lifestyle Spending Accounts aren’t a magic bullet. But they’re a signal that you’re paying attention, that you understand your employees are whole humans with complex needs, and that you’re willing to meet them where they are. Today’s HR Leaders need to be thinking about how to create personalized, equitable, and adaptable benefits to support their organizations. LSAs make that goal attainable. 

“Talent strategy” sounds fancy. But really, it’s just about treating people like adults with different lives, different priorities, and different definitions of what “support” actually means.

If you can do that, you might find your retention numbers (and other business metrics, too!) starting to move in the right direction.

Stipends and LSAs aren’t just perks anymore: they’re a strategic part of any modern total rewards strategy. They’re easy-peasy to administer, universally helpful for employees, and designed for today’s flexible, unpredictable world of work.

The post Why Lifestyle Spending Accounts Are Actually a Talent Strategy (Not Just Another Perk) appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Turiya Gray

Turiya Gray is a dynamic HR executive with 20+ years of experience building workplaces where people and performance actually thrive. Turiya is obsessed with making work better for everyone and known for her sharp insights, impactful leadership, and passion for helping organizations get people and culture right. She is also the cohost of the top-rated HR unConfidential podcast that launched in 2018. Currently, Turiya serves as Senior Partner & Fractional Chief People Officer at FXG Partners, partnering with midsize companies to deliver thoughtful, high-impact HR leadership.

Connect with Turiya on LinkedIn.

Almost eight years ago, my cohost (and dear friend) and I hit the “record” button for the first time and launched the HR unConfidential podcast. When we started HR unConfidential, we were just two HR pros pulling back the curtain on the often messy, complicated, human side of work. No podcasting experience. No fancy studio. No perfect plan. We simply had a couple of mics, lots of opinions and curiosity, and a desire for a space to have real conversations about life in HR and hopefully enlighten others on how to make the workplace better for all. 

Almost 100 episodes later, HR unConfidential has been one of my most rewarding and humbling life experiences. We’ve covered so many topics and had the privilege of talking with some amazing guests. Each episode has taught me more about what it means to build workplaces that actually work for people than any conference or textbook ever could. They’ve also pushed me to get comfortable putting my voice out there (literally) and to challenge some of my own long-held beliefs about what HR “should” be.

So as we near the 100-episode milestone, I wanted to share reflections from my podcast journey and why I’ve never been more convinced that the world of work needs brave, curious HR leaders.

The real voices of HR matter more than ever.

There’s no shortage of opinions about HR; everyone seems to have one. Scroll through LinkedIn or attend a conference, and you’ll find plenty of “hot takes” on what HR should be doing. Too often those takes come from people who haven’t actually worked in HR or even been in an actual workplace for a long time.

Don’t get me wrong — researchers, consultants, and thought leaders bring valuable perspectives. But sometimes, those big-stage insights miss the messy, nuanced reality of what it really takes to lead people, drive performance, and build cultures that last.

When we started HR unConfidential, one of our biggest goals was to elevate the voices of actual HR practitioners who are doing the work, making the tough calls, and balancing humanity with business impact every single day. For example: 

• When we wanted to discuss the power and risks of assessments in the workplace, we went straight to an Organizational Development expert (Oneka Cornelius) to hear real-life examples of how assessments might be misused and how HR professionals can ensure proper use. 
• When I wanted to learn more about HR in a global environment, we brought on two actual global CHROs to give us the real scoop about what’s alike and what’s different when leading a global team.

I’m happy to note that I’ve seen a shift in recent years. More and more real HR pros are using their platforms to share what’s working, what’s not, and what they’re learning in real time. My LinkedIn and podcast feeds are full of bold, insightful, and unapologetically honest voices who are reshaping the conversation about work from the inside out. 

That’s the movement I want to be part of; one where HR leads the dialogue about the future of work, not just reacts to it.

The “future of work” is already here.

We’ve been talking about the “future of work” for what feels like forever, and here we are, living it in real time. Work is changing faster than most organizations are built to handle, and HR sits right in the middle of that storm as part architect, part anchor.

Lately, every conversation about the future of work circles back to AI. Here’s what I’ve learned: most companies are still figuring out what AI actually means for their business strategy, people, processes, and culture. 

From helping people understand AI (and not fear it), to making sure it’s used ethically and responsibly, to rethinking how we upskill and reskill the workforce; this is HR’s lane and we are best positioned to lead the charge in our organizations. HR can help connect the dots between people and technology in ways that create real strategic advantage, not just efficiency. A couple of examples might be:

• Run an AI readiness scan: HR can lead a companywide AI readiness assessment that surfaces employee sentiment, fears, literacy gaps, and real use-case ideas, then turn those insights into a responsible AI framework that sets clear guidelines, privacy expectations, and transparent guardrails for how AI will (and won’t) be used.
• Build a skills engine: HR can use AI to mine job descriptions, performance data, and strategic priorities to build a living skills inventory that shifts performance and career development from static, role-based models to dynamic, skills-based frameworks that strengthen workforce agility and future-proof talent planning.

The future will belong to companies and HR pros that treat this moment as more than just a tech shift. It’s an opportunity for an organizational reset that calls for ongoing change management (vs. event-based), agile org design, culture transformation, and skills-based talent models that allow people to grow, move, and adapt as fast as the work around them.

Not sure where to start on your AI journey? Check out the episodes we’ve had on this topic: “Befriending AI” and “All In With AI.”

Human-centered design is the upgrade HR has been waiting for.

One of my favorite episodes of HR unConfidential is “The Power of Design Thinking in HR” (January 2025). It hits on something we don’t say out loud often enough: HR was never really trained to bring in other perspectives. We’ve been taught to prioritize control over curiosity and compliance over collaboration.

We talk about empathy all the time, yet so much of our work still happens in silos. 

COE colleagues and specialists design programs without checking in with HRBPs. 

HRBPs roll out initiatives disconnected from what the business really needs. 

The actual humans on the receiving end of the initiatives are often an afterthought.

That’s where design thinking changes the game. It’s about co-creating with your end users (aka the employees and leaders), testing ideas early, learning fast, and iterating based on real feedback. It’s about being willing to set aside the tried and (not so) true HR playbook and building HR practices that actually work for humans AND drive the business forward. 

HR doesn’t need more processes, policies, and frameworks. We need human-centered design grounded in empathy, experimentation, and humility. The biggest limitation in our field isn’t capability; it’s perspective. We’ve got to look beyond our own walls, invite challenge, and design with people, not for them.

The future of leadership won’t be taught in a classroom.

Across almost 100 episodes, one theme has been a constant: leading people is hard and getting increasingly harder. Constant change, information overload, the pressure to deliver results, all while caring for the needs of diverse team members — it’s a lot! Yet, most leaders are being trained like it’s 1999.

Traditional manager training and leadership development programs don’t work. They’re too slow, too abstract, and too disconnected from the realities of work. We send leaders to hours- and days-long workshops full of frameworks and buzzwords, but once they’re back in the whirlwind of their day jobs, what they learned rarely sticks. The 2025 Global Leadership Development Study by Harvard Business Impact confirms that “post-program sustainment” is a top challenge, with nearly 49% of companies saying that keeping learning alive after training is their biggest hurdle.

We need a different way to support managers and leaders. An approach that’s more agile, more continuous, and more human. Think learning labs, micro-experiments, communities of practice, regular coaching, and real-time feedback, not binders full of slides and leadership theories.

This clicked for me during our 2023 episode, “Leadership Trends,” with the brilliant author and leadership coach, LaTonya Wilkins. As we unpacked the skills leaders need for the future workplace, one truth rose to the surface: leadership isn’t developed through the information transfer of traditional training. It’s forged through iterative behavior change and real-world practice. 

The good news??? HR and talent development professionals are perfectly positioned to make this shift happen. Not as the trainers running programs, but as the creators of modern learning ecosystems who design experiences that help managers and leaders evolve within the flow of work, not outside of it. 

Connection is the cure.

HR can be lonely work, especially the higher your job level. When we started HR unConfidential, one of our hopes was to simply help HR professionals feel seen, heard, and a little less alone. We wanted to create a space where the conversations could be unfiltered, we could share practical ideas and insights, and folks could laugh a lot (and maybe curse a little). 

The past several years have tested the resilience of HR professionals like never before (it’s why we have multiple episodes about burnout!). We’ve been at the center of crisis after crisis, supporting others while quietly burning out ourselves. Yet, every time we chat with a guest, I get a LinkedIn message from a listener, or I’m forced to leave the house and attend a networking event, I’m recharged and reminded that connection is what keeps us going.

Community isn’t a “nice-to-have” for HR; it’s survival. When we share honestly, challenge each other thoughtfully, and learn out loud, we become better practitioners and better humans. HR doesn’t have to be lonely work. In fact, the more we connect, the stronger and more resilient we all become.

Bonus insight: Do it scared (and do it anyway).

When Gina and I started HR unConfidential, I was terrified. Terrified that no one would listen and equally terrified that a lot of people would.

Starting a podcast pushed me far outside my comfort zone. I worried about getting it wrong, not sounding “smart enough,” or saying something that makes people raise an eyebrow. I had to learn new tech, get comfortable hearing my own voice (still not there), and embrace a bit of self-promotion (which just isn’t my vibe). 

Then I reminded myself that impact doesn’t come from waiting until everything is perfect, and to just do it anyway! When you lean into your passion, even when it’s scary, it can ripple out in ways you don’t expect. Almost eight years in and our podcast is listened to in 37 countries, has beaten the odds as they relate to podcast longevity stats, and has been featured on several top HR podcasts lists.

Additionally, I’ve seen how one honest conversation or one shared insight can inspire someone or activate them to try something different: from the LinkedIn message from a listener/HR professional who shared how they started using data differently after our “HR vs. Racism” episode to the leader who told me they’d never thought about sobriety in the workplace until they heard our “Recovery in the Workplace” episode. And that’s what helps me set aside my fears every time we press record.

So my two cents: whatever you’ve been thinking about starting (a project, a business, a bold idea) just do it. You’ll figure it out as you go. Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s hitting “record” in spite of it.

In closing …

Looking back on my podcast journey, I’m filled with deep gratitude for every listener who tuned in, every guest who showed up with honesty, courage, and heart, and the global community that has supported and grown with HR unConfidential over the years.

I’m excited about what’s next. Life in HR is messy, meaningful, and full of possibility, and there’s so much more to explore, question, and create together. So please stay tuned, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to HR unConfidential wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to leave us a rating and review. 

Have ideas for topics? Want to be a guest? Just want to say hi? Follow HR unConfidential on LinkedIn and feel free to connect with me directly. Let’s keep learning out loud, pushing boundaries, and shaping the future of work one real, unConfidential conversation at a time.

The post Reflections From the Mic: What Nearly 100 Podcast Episodes Have Taught Me About HR — and What’s Next appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Kim Rohrer

Kim Rohrer is a veteran people leader, writer, speaker, and advisor with over 15 years of experience building human-centered cultures at high-growth companies. She is the founder of Patchwork Portfolio, author of the I Care Too Much newsletter, and co-host of the HR Confessions podcast. Today, Kim shapes the future of work through a variety of roles, drawing on her HR strategy and storytelling experience to build cultures worth talking about. Her work ranges from Employee Experience and Employer Brand to Communications and Community.

Connect with Kim on LinkedIn.

Every year, HR teams everywhere enter the same spiral: Which holidays do we give time off for? What do we call the December company party? And of course — how do we show appreciation in a way that will actually make people feel valued?

I’ve been there. Working as a People Leader at companies with employees all over the world, I watched well-meaning leaders struggle with the same questions year after year about whose holidays get acknowledged and how to celebrate our teams.

Spoiler alert: there is no perfect one-size-fits-all solution, no matter how many vendor demos promise you there is. And your good intentions only go so far when someone feels invisible or misunderstood.

So let’s talk about which inclusive holiday benefits actually work when you’re trying to give back to your team without leaving people out.

Not everyone celebrates the same way (and that’s the point).

We’ve all experienced that fun time at work where “the holidays” is really just corporate shorthand for “Christmas … oh, um, but also Hanukkah and I guess Kwanzaa and maybe the Winter Solstice too? Here’s our office Winter Celebrations Tree and some candy canes? Secret Santa is inclusive, right?” Awkwaaarrrrrrrd.

Many companies moved past calling it the “Christmas party” years ago, but even “holiday party” dances around the reality: people celebrate different things, at different times, in wildly different ways. 

Some of your employees are fasting during Ramadan or Yom Kippur while meeting deadlines. Others don’t observe any religious holidays, but still like to celebrate the season. Some people want shiny company-branded swag, and others like to end the year holed up in a snow-covered cabin with no technology. 

The point is, plenty of folks have traditions they want to celebrate this time of year — they just don’t want you to assume what that celebration looks like.

It’s nearly impossible to design one holiday experience that reflects the reality of your entire team’s lived experiences — and you should stop trying, like, now. There is a better way!

This is where Lifestyle Spending Accounts start to make sense as an inclusion strategy, not just a benefits offering. When you give people a stipend they can use however they want, you’re not just giving them flexibility; you’re acknowledging the diverse spectrum of needs (and that you don’t know what they all are) and demonstrating that you trust them to make their own choices.

That might mean:

• Buying ingredients for a special family meal
• Covering travel costs to visit loved ones
• Purchasing gifts that align with their traditions
• Supporting a cause they care about through donations
• Using it for something completely unrelated to any holiday at all

And bonus: Compt’s Midyear Benchmark Report found that 70% of stipend spending goes to local and independent vendors rather than big-box retailers — hell yes to keeping those dollars in your local community, where they actually matter!

The point isn’t to celebrate everything. It’s to stop pretending there’s one right way to celebrate anything.

The great swag waste problem affects us all.

Let’s be honest: most company swag is expensive garbage.

Boxes of logo’d hoodies in the wrong sizes, sitting in storage until the company rebrands. Employees who already have four water bottles and zero interest in a fifth. Gift boxes filled with artisanal candles that smell like “forest floor” or whatever, shipped in packaging that could survive a nuclear blast, destined to sit unopened in a closet, waiting for the next white elephant gift swap.

And we do this every holiday season, convincing ourselves that this year’s holiday swag will be different. It’s not.

Not everyone wants to splurge on something for themselves, either. While some employees will definitely enjoy a free massage or a special excursion on an upcoming vacation, some would rather make a donation to a cause they care about during end-of-year giving season. Others might use it to cover groceries or household essentials when finances are stretched thin. 

But maybe someone does want that hoodie with the new company logo. Great! Let them choose it from your swag store so you don’t have to trek to every GAP within commuting distance to track down those cool hoodies in everyone’s sizes that they are sold out of online, so that you can send them to the local embroidery shop in time for the holiday party. (Been there.) 

Rather than giving everyone another mug that will end up at Goodwill because they’re still using last year’s mug as a pen holder on their desk and they don’t need another damn mug … let folks use a company gift platform to buy something for a family member when money is tight. (Done that.)

That flexibility matters.

Besides, when you default to one-size-fits-all gifts, you’re not just wasting money; you’re contributing to overproduction, excess shipping, and literal trash. The environmental impact alone should make us rethink the model. If your office swag closet (or apartment, increasingly common in our remote-work environment) is full of unwanted leftovers, you know what I mean.

The gift isn’t the hoodie or the expensive whiskey. The gift is respecting that people have different values and priorities.

Stop managing holiday chaos point by point.

Even if you’ve moved past bulk swag orders, there’s still the vendor management nightmare.

You research gift platforms. Schedule demos. Negotiate pricing. Sign the contract. Send the announcement. Next year (or even sooner), you’re doing it all over again because the last vendor didn’t have enough options, or the interface was clunky, or people just didn’t use it.

And every platform has the same rotation of meal kits, candles, and succulents. It’s like they’re all pulling from the same catalog of things people are too polite to say they don’t want. 🤭

Managing point solutions for every occasion — birthdays, work anniversaries, holidays, life events — is exhausting. You’re juggling logins, budgets, approval workflows, and reporting across multiple platforms, all for “personalization” that isn’t actually personal. And time is money, right? Your time is valuable. Don’t waste it on administrative nonsense that doesn’t make an impact. 

Meanwhile, your employees are drowning in accounts they never asked for, trying to remember which platform has their points, which one expires, and whether this quarter’s wellness credit can be used for that thing they want or if they need to wait for next quarter’s stipend. Only 28% of employees surveyed by benefits broker NFP report making maximum use of perks and benefits because of “the misfit of benefits offered versus what is valued.”

Blegh.

It’s a lot of effort for a system that fundamentally misses the point: people just want choice. Compt’s case study with Quickbase blew my mind (processing benefits now takes 90 minutes instead of literal days!), and — hot off the presses — their new case study with TEN7 says it only takes 5-10 minutes a month to administer!

Wish Compt had been around when I was having “help me organize my swag closet” body doubling sessions and hosting “swag trade” happy hours to help get rid of overstock!

The real gift? Feeling seen.

Holiday planning doesn’t have to be this hard. You don’t need the perfect gift, the perfect vendor, or the perfect way to acknowledge every celebration on the calendar.

You just need to treat your employees like adults — adults who know what they value, what they celebrate, and what would actually make them feel appreciated.

That’s what inclusive holiday benefits (and inclusion in general) actually look like in practice. Not a carefully curated gift box. Not a generic “Happy Holidays” email. Just respect, flexibility, and trust. 

Imagine that.

P.S. I wouldn’t write for Compt if I didn’t love the team and believe in the product. Book a no-pressure demo today and see what the fuss is about! 

The post How to Support Every Employee With Inclusive Holiday Benefits appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Jennifer Kean

Jennifer Kean is Chief Growth Officer at Umbra Health Advocacy, where she helps connect families with patient advocates who navigate complex healthcare systems and reduce caregiver burden. With more than 20 years of experience scaling consumer startups and developing HR strategies, talent acquisition programs, and retention policies, Jennifer brings both professional expertise and personal insight to the caregiving conversation. She became a passionate advocate for caregiver support after experiencing firsthand the challenges of advocating for her elderly father during his recent health crisis, including an 8-week hospitalization and subsequent transitions to skilled nursing and assisted living care. This personal journey reinforced her belief that every patient needs an advocate — and every caregiver needs support.

Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn.

They arrive early for meetings looking tired. They take calls in the parking lot during lunch. They use vacation days for appointments that aren’t their own. These are your caregivers, and they make up one in five of your workforce.

If you work in HR, you already know that supporting employees means more than just offering health insurance and retirement plans. Today’s workforce faces a growing challenge that affects productivity, retention, and well-being. More than 20% of American workers are caring for aging parents or sick family members while maintaining their careers. They spend an average of 26 hours per week providing care, essentially working a second unpaid job.

The cost of ignoring this reality is steep. Caregiving employees miss more work days, experience higher stress levels, and often leave the workforce entirely when the burden becomes too much. Companies lose experienced talent, face increased recruitment costs, and see productivity drop across teams. But there’s good news. Forward-thinking organizations are discovering that supporting caregivers with employee caregiver benefits isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s smart business.

Understanding the caregiver employee experience

Picture Sarah from Accounting. She’s been with your company for eight years and consistently delivers excellent work. Lately, though, she seems distracted. She’s taking more sick days and declining travel opportunities she once jumped at. What you don’t see is that Sarah spends her evenings coordinating her mother’s medical appointments, reviewing Medicare statements she doesn’t understand, and arguing with insurance companies about coverage denials. She uses her lunch breaks to call doctors’ offices and her vacation days to accompany her mother to specialist visits two hours away.

Sarah represents millions of employees trying to balance caregiving with their careers. They’re making medical decisions they feel unqualified for, navigating complex healthcare systems, and often feeling guilty no matter how much they do. The stress affects their work performance, their health, and their financial stability. Many reduce their work hours or leave their jobs entirely, creating gaps in your workforce that are expensive and difficult to fill.

Building a caregiver support program that works

Supporting caregiver employees doesn’t require reinventing your entire benefits package. Here are practical steps you can implement:

• Offer flexible work arrangements. Remote-work options and flexible scheduling allow employees to manage both responsibilities more effectively. When someone can work from home twice a week, they save commute time that can be used for caregiving tasks.
• Provide paid family leave for caregiving. Your employees are already entitled to unpaid leave under FMLA for caregiving, but why stop there? Consider offering paid family leave for caregiving just as you do for maternity, paternity, and parental leave. Make sure employees know they can use their sick time for caregiving, too. When companies treat caring for aging parents with the same respect as caring for new babies, they send a powerful message about valuing families at every stage of life.
• Add patient advocacy services to your benefits package. Umbra Health Advocacy offers employer programs with which you can provide professional patient advocates as an employee benefit. You can choose to fully pay for the services, subsidize them, or simply contract with Umbra to get your employees a discount. Because Medicare covers these services for elder care, it’s a surprisingly low-cost way to provide high-value support. Patient advocates understand insurance benefits and help families navigate senior care, medical billing issues, and the transition to assisted living or nursing homes. They can also assist employees who need to navigate a new illness, like cancer, or care for a disabled child.
• Provide caregiving stipends for financial support. Through Compt, companies can offer monthly or annual stipends that employees use for caregiving expenses. In addition to the usual childcare needs, this might cover adult daycare costs, patient advocacy costs, respite care services, or a home care aid. Schedule a call with a Compt benefits expert to learn how to support your caregiving employees.

Connecting employees to professional resources

Many employees don’t realize that professional help exists for their caregiving challenges. You can provide a lot of support just by sharing valuable federal and state programs that are often free or low cost.

• Area Agencies on Aging: The first stop for any caregiver is their local Area Agency on Aging. They exist in every state, though they may be called different things. You can find yours by searching this term along with your state or county or city. They are a central resource on all the elder care resources available to you. They provide free consultations, connect families to local services, and help with Medicaid applications. They can arrange respite care, meal delivery, and transportation services.
• Local senior centers: Senior centers are typically for more active people 55+ that do not need supervision. They can be great places for social interaction and they offer all sorts of classes and community events. Their fees are nominal.
• Adult daycare: Adult daycare centers are for seniors that need more supervision or assistance with things during the day like meals or medication. These services cost a fee, which varies widely by geography. Typical rates are around $85-$100/day. Find local options through the National Adult Day Services Association.
• National Family Caregiver Support Program (NFCSP): This federally funded program through the Older Americans Act provides free services through your local Area Agency on Aging, including respite care, counseling, training, support groups, and supplemental services. The program serves caregivers of adults 60 and older, caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s, and grandparents raising grandchildren.
• Lifespan Respite Care Programs: Available in 38 states plus D.C., these programs provide vouchers or reimbursements for respite care services, often up to $750 per year. Many states offer emergency respite vouchers and self-directed options for families to choose their own providers. Visit the ARCH National Respite Network to find your state’s program.
• VA Caregiver Support Program: For families of veterans, this program offers education, training, health insurance (if otherwise uninsured), mental health counseling, monthly stipends, and respite care. Call 1-855-260-3274 for more information.
• National helplines and locators: The Eldercare Locator (1-800-677-1116) connects families to local services nationwide. The ARCH Respite Locator helps families find respite programs in their area.

Remember that many of these programs prioritize families with the greatest economic need, but middle-income families often qualify, too.

Making it easy for employees to access support

The best support programs fail if employees don’t know about them or feel uncomfortable using them. Many caregivers don’t identify themselves as such. They think of themselves as just helping out Mom or doing what families do. Here’s how to ensure your support reaches those who need it:

• Create a Caregiver Resource Guide. Pull together all your caregiving-related benefits and trusted local and national resources into one easy-to-access guide. Make sure employees can view it privately and understand which services are covered by insurance vs. those that require payment. Include practical details for elder care, like the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, what Medicare covers, home healthcare vs. home care services, and guidance on power of attorney and health proxies. Highlight how your EAP and other existing benefits, such as a caregiving stipend or applicable categories in your Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA), can support caregivers, and consider tapping internal or external experts to help ensure accuracy.
• Use inclusive language. Studies show that caregivers may be unaware of benefits or hesitant to use them, often because of stigma or perceived insufficiency. Instead of asking who needs caregiver support, talk about employees who help aging parents, support family members with health conditions, or coordinate medical care for loved ones. This will help your employees see themselves as caregivers and seek needed support accordingly.
• Train managers to recognize signs. When an employee mentions spending weekends at their parent’s house or taking time off for someone else’s medical appointment, that’s an opportunity to share available resources without prying into personal situations.
• Host lunch and learn sessions. Bring in experts to discuss Medicare benefits, long-term care planning, or managing medical paperwork. Record these sessions so employees can watch them privately if they prefer.
• Normalize the conversation. Share statistics about caregiving in your company communications. When employees realize that 20% of their colleagues face similar challenges, they’re more likely to seek help.
• Ensure privacy. Make resources available through self-service portals on which employees can find information without having to disclose their personal situation to HR.

The business case: Why supporting caregivers is smart economics

Supporting your caregiver employees isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s a strategic business investment that directly impacts your bottom line. Consider the stark reality: According to Guardian Life’s 12th Annual Workplace Benefits Study, caregiving responsibilities cost the U.S. economy nearly $44 billion annually due to lost productivity and absenteeism.

But here’s what smart employers know: much of this loss is preventable with the right support systems in place.

The hidden costs of unsupported caregivers

When caregivers lack workplace support, the numbers tell a sobering story. Guardian Life’s research reveals that working caregivers are twice as likely to take disability-related leaves of absence, with 27% missing 30+ days of work compared to just 14% of noncaregivers. Even more concerning, the same study found that 29% of caregivers reduce their work hours, and one in five take demotions or leaves of absence to manage their responsibilities. 

For employers, this translates to constant recruitment costs, knowledge loss, and productivity gaps that ripple across teams.

The ROI of employee caregiver benefits

By contrast, when employers provide flexible work arrangements, caregiver resources, and understanding policies, they see measurable returns. Caregivers who feel supported report better mental health and job satisfaction, and employees with better well-being are inherently more productive.

The math is simple: retaining an experienced employee costs far less than the typical 6-12 months’ salary required to replace them.

Moreover, supported caregivers become your most loyal employees. When you help them navigate their dual responsibilities, they can focus on their work rather than constantly juggling crisis management. They’re present, both physically and mentally, contributing their expertise rather than anxiously watching the clock or fielding emergency calls. 

How to offer support with employee caregiver benefits: Contact Compt or Umbra Health Advocacy

For more information about implementing caregiving stipends, request a Compt demo.

To learn about adding patient advocacy services to your employee benefits package, contact Umbra Health Advocacy at benefits@umbrahealthadvocacy.com or 857-766-8236.

The post Employee Caregiver Benefits: Why It’s Time to Add Elder Care and Family Support to Your Program appeared first on COMPT.