BEYOND salary: five ways to make Total Reward Month count

By Esther Smith

Peter Stack wanted Urenco to be a destination company.

One way its reward team supported that ambition was remarkably simple: show employees what they were actually getting.

Its total reward statements (UK) bring together base pay, bonus, healthcare, life cover and, importantly, an employer pension contribution of 16%. Stack, Urenco’s Group Head of Reward, told Benifex: “Anyone can have words on a piece of paper or on a poster or flashy video on your intranet. But it’s actually about living and breathing that and bringing it to life.”

Any HR leader who has launched a new benefit will recognise the problem. Employees tend to know their salary but are not often aware of the full value of the benefits being offered to them. Ask what their employer contributes to their pension, what their health cover includes, whether they have life assurance, financial support or useful discounts such as a car salary sacrifice scheme and there may well be some blank looks.

Drewberry’s 2026 benchmarking research, covering 626 UK HR and finance professionals, found 91.7% believed their benefits were understood by employees. Its separate employee research put the figure at just 36%.

Benifex found a similar disconnect. Some 64% of employers had added or expanded benefits in the previous year. Only 32% of employees thought their benefits offering had improved.

That makes September’s Total Reward Month a useful opportunity to help employees understand the value of what they have.

For HR Directors, that suggests there may be considerable untapped value already sitting inside the reward budget.

Here are five ways to make more of it.

1. Show employees the full number

For businesses not doing a total reward statement, it is a good opportunity to start as this is the place employees can see the full breakdown. Let’s take an example of a typical UK salary.

Salary: £50,000.

Employer pension contribution: £4,000.

Bonus: £2,500.

Then add medical cover, life assurance and other employer-funded benefits.

The employment deal suddenly looks rather different from the salary number alone.

UK Power Networks gives its 6,000 employees a personalised total reward statement covering pay, bonus, overtime, long-service awards, pension contributions and medical cover.

Tesco go even further. Its online statements have included a short personalised video showing colleagues what their pension could eventually be worth.

And the statement no longer has to mean an annual PDF filed away and forgotten. A modern total rewards strategy can give employees an up-to-date view of the package whenever they need it.

The principle is straightforward: if the organisation is paying for it, make sure employees can see it.

2. Get pension and benefits providers in front of employees

For many employers, pension contributions are among the biggest investments made beyond salary.

They are also remarkably easy for employees to overlook.

DWP research on workplace pension engagement found that people may understand the information they receive while still struggling to translate it into what it actually means for their retirement. Employers can also be an important trusted route for that information.

So get the pension provider out from behind the login screen.

National Care Group worked with Cushon using webinars, on-site lunch-and-learns and one-to-one support for its 2,900 employees. Six months later, 56% had downloaded the app and 45% were using it monthly.

The same approach can work across other benefits.

Ask pension providers, insurers and benefits advisers what employee education is already included in the contract. They may offer webinars, calculators, drop-ins, roadshows or individual sessions that HR has barely used.

HR does not need to become the pensions expert. HR just needs to put employees in front of one instead.

3. Use financial education to explain the value

Financial wellbeing often sits in a different HR box from reward. In a large organisation it can also live within ED&I teams. Wherever it lives, the case for bringing them together is strong.

CIPD’s 2026 reward survey of 1,059 UK reward decision-makers found only 15% had a formal financial wellbeing policy or strategy. Read our coverage of the issue in Employee financial wellbeing hits a four-year high.

Yet there is plenty employers can explain without straying into personal financial advice.

How do employer pension contributions work?

What does salary sacrifice mean in practice?

What financial support is buried inside the EAP?

What can employees actually save through the discount platform?

What support is available as people approach retirement?

Financial education helps employees move from “apparently I have this benefit” to “now I understand why it might be useful to me.”

And those conversations should change with life stage. The questions of a 25-year-old employee are unlikely to be the same as those of someone ten years from retirement.

4. Communicate benefits throughout the year

One launch email is not a benefits communications strategy.

Yet email remains the most common way UK employers communicate benefits, used by 57.2% of Drewberry’s respondents. Employee handbooks came second at 37.5%.

The problem is that employees do not need every benefit on the day HR happens to launch it.

Parental benefits become relevant when somebody starts a family.

Carer’s leave can go from invisible to essential almost overnight.

Pensions become more salient at different career stages.

“You could have the most generous benefits package in your industry,” said Danielle Bines, an employee benefits consultant at Drewberry. “But if only a handful of your staff know about it, its perceived value plummets.”

So communicate the employment deal throughout the employee lifecycle.

Talk about it in recruitment.

Explain it properly during onboarding.

Include the wider package in pay and reward conversations.

Use Total Reward Month, pensions campaigns and financial wellbeing activity as reasons to bring particular elements back to the surface.

And make benefits easy to find when employees actually need them.

The best benefits communication starts to look less like HR administration and more like good consumer marketing: timely, relevant, repeated and easy to act on.

5. Check whether employees actually value what you provide

We all know that better communication cannot rescue a benefit employees simply do not value.

CIPD found 22% of employers have no defined objectives for their employee benefits. Among those that do, only 31% link them to productivity.

That is thin ground for what can be a substantial area of workforce spending, and part of the reason employers are taking a harder look at which workplace perks still earn their keep.

Use Total Reward Month to look at the data.

Which benefits are employees using?

Which do they know about but ignore?

Which would they genuinely miss if they disappeared?

Which help with recruitment or retention?

And which remain in the package largely because they have always been there?

A graduate, a parent of young children, a carer and an employee approaching retirement may all define a valuable reward package differently.

Make Total Reward Month about visibility, not more stuff

For HR Directors, this is perhaps the most useful opportunity in Total Reward Month.

Improving the employee proposition does not automatically mean increasing the benefits budget, but instead getting more out of the existing investment by helping employees truly understand what is there.

Refresh total reward statements. Bring pension and benefits providers in to meet employees. Run financial education sessions. Resurface useful benefits at the moments people are most likely to need them. Then look honestly at what employees use and value.

Urenco’s 16% pension contribution is a good illustration.

The contribution had value before it appeared prominently in the total reward story.

But showing employees that number makes it much harder for a significant part of the employment deal to remain invisible.

And that is ultimately the point.

Employers already spend heavily beyond salary.

The job for HR is to make sure employees know what the rest of the deal is worth.

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