Podcast

” We are sitting on so much data today, and how do we use that data to actually make these benefits more relevant to employees, is where the digital bit comes in.”

—Sajja Praveen Chowdary

1. How have employee benefits evolved in the last years?

Over the past years, employee benefits have changed significantly—from largely seen as standard offerings that employees received, regardless of whether they required it or not like health insurance, retirement plans, and the occasional paid time off to more personalized perks that truly address their needs currently.

Today, more emphasis is given to making them meaningful, accessible, convenient, and customized to ease employees’ needs and truly ensure their wellbeing. And digital tools and platforms have played a significant role in it. They have changed the entire approach to employee benefits, making them more streamlined and easy-to track than before.

As highlighted by Sajja Praveen Chowdary in The CHRO Mindset, one of the best HR podcasts for professionals, employee benefits and expenses today reflect an organization’s values. Companies offering standardized, checklist kind of benefits in 2025, imply non-prioritization of their employees’ preferences.

Accenture’s revolution to benefit

Accenture India’s “Benefits You” program is a hyper-personalized and comprehensive initiative that empowers employees to select benefits tailored to their unique circumstances.

The program includes options for,

• family care, such as child adoption assistance and eldercare support,
• financial well-being perks like retirement planning, insurance, and budgeting tools.
• wellness offerings, such as fitness memberships, mental health support, and access to personalized health coaching.

Its flexible approach allows employees to prioritize what matters most to them, leading to increased job satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Because of its success Accenture India was positioned as a leader in employee well-being, driving both individual and organizational growth.

2. How does personalization in employee benefits enhance engagement, retention, and loyalty?

The one-size-fits-all benefits package is no longer working for employees. Personal and individual preferences have become a part of people’s life—even in professional environments. Modern employees do expect similar personalization levels as they receive from platforms like e-commerce giant, Amazon or the OTT platform, Netflix. Sajja points out that offering personalized employee benefits makes them feel supported in their individual journey and drives higher engagement. Furthermore, it enhances their job satisfaction and overall productivity.

From perks to perks—personalized!

Infosys is known for its vast ecosystem of interconnected platforms to offer an engaged experience to its global employees. For example, it enhances employee experience through,

• InfyMe that’s a digital platform offering personalized services,
• InfyGold+ which is a rewards program with customizable benefits,
• HALE (Health Assessment & Lifestyle Enrichment) that promotes overall well-being
• Samaritans Network for peer-to-peer support, and
• Lex, a modular development platform for learning and career growth

Infosys doesn’t hold a bar while focusing on career pathing, internal mobility, diversity and inclusion programs, and continuous listening for its employees through regular surveys. These are the practices that are crucial for building an engaged and future-ready workforce.

3. How do digital platforms enhance employee benefits experience?

Earlier, employee benefits felt like filling in multiple forms, remembering employee codes, and wrestling with outdated portals, offering unfriendly user-interface and complicated navigation. These platforms often made employees spend more time figuring out how to access their benefits than actually using them conveniently. But this is changing now—thanks to digital platforms.

These platforms are building new experiences for how employee benefits and expenses are delivered and experienced. They are user-friendly, intuitive, and highly accessible, allowing employees to utilize perks timely, and with full ease.

Also, Sajja Praveen insightfully highlights that real-time data from these platforms reveals the most and the least used benefits by employees to HR. This empowers them to design smarter, data-driven decisions, offering more relevancy in employee benefits and expenses while reducing waste and inefficiency.

From employee experience to employee benefit experience:

Zenefits, Gusto, or Darwin by Mercer are tools that do more than just manage enrollment. They help employees enroll in wellness programs, review their plan coverage, and book a session with a counselor— all from a single dashboard.

The tools have made it personal—not just efficient, anymore, implying modern employee benefits aren’t about ticking boxes anymore. They are here to create an experience that’s thoughtful, supportive, and truly built around people.

4. Why are employee benefits evolving from transactional to transformational?

Today, companies are building workplaces where employees feel supported, motivated, and ready to do their best work. Sajja Praveen Chowdary points out that forward-looking companies are moving away from standard perks and focusing on transformational benefits. The ones that truly add value to employees’ lives.

It’s no longer just about attracting employees with something they don’t need, like health insurance or access to certification or courses. It’s about supporting employees’ overall well-being, growth, and resilience.

This includes mental health support, financial planning tools, continuous learning, and career development programs. benefits that care for the whole person, not just their job role. This in turn leads to higher satisfaction, stronger engagement, and better retention.

Salesforce’s transformational benefits:

Salesforce started offering a $100/month wellbeing reimbursement instead of traditional perks to its employees to allow them the flexibility they need.

With this benefit, employees can get access to,

• free therapy sessions,
• financial coaching, and
• any other initiative that adds to their mental peace.

Additionally, its ‘Trailhead’ platform supports its employees’ continuous career growth through online learning and certifications. This holistic approach has helped Salesforce boost employee engagement and earn a spot among the top workplaces globally.

5. How does a company’s culture of care and provision of flexible employee benefits impact employee engagement and retention?

Sajja Chowdary points out, care is not only a soft skill but a strategic business tool, employers have realized the value of perfect employee benefits to suit their needs.

A company’s culture that revolves around care has a direct connection to long-term employee retention, loyalty, and employee advocacy. When employees feel valued and supported through flexible and meaningful benefits like mental health programs or career growth opportunities, they are likely to stay loyal to their companies for longer tenures and show high engagement with the goals.

Google’s culture of care that really cares:

At Google, primary caregivers receive up to 24 weeks of paid parental leave, while non-primary caregivers get up to 12 weeks. The company also provides on-site wellness services such as,

• massage therapy,
• mental health counseling, and
• free gourmet meals—tailored to dietary needs.

Meanwhile Microsoft offers 20 weeks of paid parental leave and 4 weeks of paid caregiver leave for family health crises. In 2022, Microsoft also introduced mental health support via the Headspace app and annual mental health days off.

These hyper-personalized benefits have been linked to Microsoft’s 87% employee satisfaction rate (as per its internal surveys) and Google’s continued presence on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list.

6. What strategies can CHROs adopt to effectively implement modern employee benefits?

CHROs can start with simple and effective strategies to implement modern employee benefits at their workplaces. First, by replacing the mindset, ’employee benefits are a checklist,’ to ‘employee benefits must make them feel valued and belonged.‘ Next, they must replace outdated and obsolete platforms with advanced ones, if their vision is to provide an employee benefit package that covers all the aspects of an employee’s well-being. Digital or AI-driven tools help in tracking employee benefits (such as their usage, or underuse), collecting feedback, and recommending predictive actions, eventually creating a highly personalized benefit package that resonates with your employees’ real-life needs and minimizes financial waste.

As a CHRO, you can act on these steps to implement modern benefits successfully:

• Replace the old mindset of ‘checklist‘ about employee benefits with ‘crucial.’
• Update your means of benefit accessing- make it from manual to automated.
• Train your employees to access the employee benefits with ease.
• Partner with vendors, offering integrated wellness employee benefit packages.

Microsoft’s modern benefits to retain top talent

Microsoft has continuously evolved its employee benefits to support holistic well-being and professional growth. It offers a wide range of benefits such as 24/7 access to counseling services through its,

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP),
• mental health resources like Headspace, and
• discretionary time-off to empower employees to take time for personal health without limitations.

It additionally provides flexible work arrangements, giving employees the option to choose their working hours and remote work options. Its investment in continuous learning is evident through platforms like Microsoft Learning and LinkedIn Learning, offering courses tailored to career development. The initiatives taken have not only helped Microsoft retain top talent but have also fostered a strong culture of employee advocacy, making it one of the most sought-after employers in the tech industry.

7. What role does AI and real-time data play in employee benefits?

With AI and real-time data analysis, tracking and proactive adjustments of employee benefits, HR can get a broader view into their company’s resources and its utilization. In large-scale companies, managing perks and benefits is impossible due to large data sets and processing them into intelligence insights.

Some of the functions AI can effortlessly manage in employee benefits are:

• Analysis of employee behavior, preferences, and needs to suggest personalization,
• Automation of routine tasks like enrollment, claims processing, running eligibility checks,
• Analyzing underutilization and overutilization of benefits to recommend better ways for their absorption or removal.

Cigna’s AI-monitored benefits and plans

Cigna, a global health services company uses AI-driven chatbots to assist employees with their healthcare benefits as well as offers personalized support for challenges like claim tracking and finding in-network providers.

This AI- capability also helps HR teams to leverage:

• predictive analytics plan future health needs, such as wellness programs or mental health services.
• ensure employees with timely and relevant benefits,
• enhanced overall employee experience, and
• streamlines benefits management

8. What are the challenges of balancing flexibility with scalability in employee benefits?

While balancing flexibility with increasing scalability, HR can face multiple challenges. From increased financial strain on organizations to a dissatisfying employee benefits experience for employees. Personalizing employee benefits while staying within a company’s budget and standards has issues such as:

• Unsustainable business finances,
• Overused or underutilized employee benefits,
• Unmanaged multiple platforms (one for each benefit)
• Unearned perks can increase the sense of entitlement in employees

Google’s mantra for striking the right balance

Google introduced unlimited paid time off (PTO) policy for its employees, but in 2018, it realized that though it was an attractive perk, it wasn’t working as intended. It noticed that this perk made employees,

• either not using it at all,
• taking more than the company had expected,
• had their productivity dropped, and

Additionally, it led to the company facing financial strain. This pattern highlighted a valuable lesson for Google that while flexibility in employee benefits is crucial, offering uncapped perks with unclear boundaries can lead to unintended consequences. Finding the right balance between freedom and structure is key to ensuring that benefits support both the well-being of employees and the long-term sustainability of the business.

9. How can a unified digital ecosystem improve employee benefits and expense management?

A unified digital platform helps in centralizing multiple employee benefit platforms for wellness plans, retirement programs, healthcare insurance, etc. It reduces HR’s administrative load and enables them to track, analyze, gain insights on benefit usage to add more personalization to the package. Additionally, it ensures employees have consistent experience across the board, high operational efficiency, and job satisfaction.

From digital platforms to digital ecosystem:

Multinational companies like IBM and Accenture leverage SAP SuccessFactors and Workday respectively. These unified digital platforms help them centralize data from other platforms—healthcare employee benefits, wellness programs, and retirement planning. These work as one point of information, enable real-time tracking, and in-depth data analysis of employee benefits. Additionally, the insights generated can be implemented by HR for a more tailored benefit package—eventually helping them boost employees’ overall benefit experience, job satisfaction, work efficiency. It also ensures a,

• consistent global employee experience, and
• significant reduction in HR’s administrative workload

Key Points to Note:

• Streamline all processes to reduce your manual administrative workload,
• Leverage employees’ usage behavior data to tailor more personalized options,
• Analyze issues with usage and address them to reduce financial drains,
• Offer a seamless experience across the platforms with integrations,
• Unify different platforms for wellness, retirement, healthcare programs, etc. into one.