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Before 2020, employee benefits were largely one-size-fits-all where employers dictated perks, and employees had little choice. Standard offerings such as retirement plans, on-site childcare, and free meals were the norm.
However, the pandemic and the rise of remote-hybrid work, coupled with the growing influence of Millennials and Gen Zs, have triggered a major shift in total rewards strategy. Today’s employee benefits focus on work-life balance, mental and financial well-being, and flexibility—factors that are reshaping expectations. Randstad’s 2025 Workmonitor finds that 31% of workers have left a job due to a lack of flexibility in terms of benefits offered.
As employee expectations evolve, HR and People Ops teams face increasing pressure to offer benefits that satisfy multi-generational preferences and align with shifting workforce trends.
This article provides actionable strategies for designing benefits packages that meet the demands of today’s talent in 2025. You’ll also gain expert-backed insights to guide your transition from traditional perks to holistic, personalized offerings.
Why Employee Benefits Matter for Startups and Global Teams
Employee benefits play a critical role in helping growing businesses attract and retain top talent, improve employee well-being, and foster a healthy company culture. Here’s why they matter:
- Attract and Retain Talent: Benefit packages are powerful tools for attracting, satisfying, and retaining top talent, especially in a tight labor market where 74% of employers struggle to find skilled candidates. According to Indeed’s 2024 Workforce Insights Report, 34% of job seekers rank better benefits as a top motivator. Similarly, Gallup’s Employee Retention and Attraction Indicator found that pay and benefits were the leading reasons employees changed jobs in 2024.
- Improve Employee Well-being: Beyond recruitment and retention, well-designed benefit programs promote holistic employee well-being, including financial, physical, mental, and professional well-being. This is especially crucial, as 81% of employees report feeling nervous, anxious, and stressed.
Investing in employees' well-being shows your commitment to their overall health. Gallup research supports this, showing that employees who feel good about their lives take 53% fewer sick days and are 32% less likely to seek new jobs. Benefits such as mental health support, flexible schedules, health insurance, and generous paid time off (PTO) help promote healthy lifestyles and drive work-life balance.
- Build a Healthy Company Culture: Comprehensive benefits also help build inclusive, borderless organizational cultures, especially in hybrid or remote environments. They combine financial incentives with fun activities like team-building outings to strengthen connections and ease transitions during periods of change.
For example, when Aspida moved from remote to hybrid, the company introduced “Free Lunch Tuesdays” and other in-office perks to entice employees. As Sandy Ball, Aspida's Chief People Officer, shared, these simple gestures created a supportive and engaging environment for employees to return to, encouraging them to embrace the transition.
Key Trends Shaping Employee Benefits in 2025
Employee expectations are evolving fast, making it increasingly difficult for businesses to determine what workers value. In 2024 alone, SHRM Employee Benefits Survey identified 216 comprehensive benefits, a 23% increase from 175 in 2023. This surge highlights the growing diversity of employee needs, and the pressure is on companies to keep up and offer tailored benefits that meet these demands. But with so many perks on the table, HR leaders face pressure to keep benefits relevant and aligned with shifting priorities. To help you manage this complexity and cut through the clutter, here are the key trends shaping total rewards in 2025:
Personalized and Flexible Benefits
Personalized benefits have become a top priority for companies seeking to attract, retain, and support a diverse, multigenerational workforce. From Gen Z, who now make up over a quarter of the global workforce, to the sandwich generation (middle-aged individuals juggling childcare and eldercare), employees have different needs.
Suzy Goodwin, Benefits Expert and Client Success Manager at Airvet, notes that “benefits aren’t linear.” As she explains, a regular gym-goer may suddenly need in-home fitness equipment when caring for an aging parent. This highlights the importance of tailoring benefits to employees' evolving needs and lifestyles.
While foundational perks like retirement plans, healthcare, and PTO remain essential, they’re no longer sufficient. More companies are adopting cafeteria-style plans where employees choose from a menu of pre-tax benefit packages based on their individual needs. Under cafeteria plans, employees contribute a portion of their gross salary to the scheme. For example, employees nearing retirement may contribute to their 401(k), while those with large families might prefer a more comprehensive health insurance plan.
Popular offerings in flexible benefits packages include family care support, menopausal healthcare, student loan assistance, flexible spending accounts (for healthcare and dependent care), grandparent leave, and customizable fitness plans. These flexible benefits help reduce wasteful spending on underused offerings. After all, employees are more likely to value benefits that genuinely meet their unique needs.
Mental Health & Emotional Wellbeing Support
As more organizations recognize the lasting impact of stress and burnout, comprehensive wellness packages have become a significant benefit. A Gallup survey reports that 23% of Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) say employee wellbeing is a top priority for their organization. This growing focus is inspiring change, as 45% of companies plan to invest in more wellness programs.
Employers now offer diverse perks that address various aspects of employee well-being, including therapy access, mental health days, wellness apps, yoga classes, flexible work arrangements, and stress management programs. For instance, PwC closes its offices two weeks a year to ensure employees take time off and recharge together. This company-wide pause helps eliminate the guilt of taking rest and ensures that employees don’t feel pressured to catch up on missed work, ultimately reducing burnout and promoting the work-life balance essential for maintaining a healthy company culture.
To maximize results from wellbeing programs, Sims Tillirson, Go-to-Market Advisor at Benefits Resource Group, urges companies to view wellness programs as “preventative tools” that address issues early before they escalate into long-term healthcare costs, absenteeism, or turnover. Carl Chapman, VP of Benefit Design & Partnerships at Thanks Ben, agrees, adding that these programs can help build a healthier workforce over time.
Remote Work Perks & Home Office Support
As more companies embrace hybrid and fully remote work, employees increasingly expect support for comfortable and productive home office setups.
Buffer’s 2023 State of Remote Work report highlights that 23% of remote employees feel lonely, and 16% struggle with focus. To address these challenges, forward-thinking companies invest in perks that ensure a smooth remote work experience, such as equipment allowances, housekeeping services, Wi-Fi stipends, corporate gym memberships, home office setups, screen time tracking tools, and co-working spaces. These benefits empower employees to customize their workspace, increasing productivity and job satisfaction.
Financial Wellness & Future Security
Per the 2024 Voice of the Workplace Report, 77% of HR and benefits leaders recognize that financial anxiety affects mental health and plan to address it. With workers facing inflation, economic recession, and concerns about long-term wealth, financial wellness perks have become crucial in combating poor sleep, reduced motivation to exercise, and low productivity at work.
Tony Garavaglia, Senior Vice President at Alliant Insurance Services, notes how financial wellness affects employees across all income cohorts. Even high earners, he notes, face issues such as low credit scores or 401k hardship withdrawals.
Given these financial pressures, workers expect more than retirement plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). In response, companies are offering perks that promote financial stability and holistic well-being. These benefits include financial coaching, student loan repayment assistance, salary advance tools, emergency savings plans, and retirement planning.
Some companies also adopt employer-funded programs like Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs), giving employees flexible funds for health, wellness, or lifestyle needs. For instance, Airbnb gives its employees $2,000 annually for travel and leisure.
Global Health & Family Benefits
Familial benefits play a critical role in supporting workers managing the demands of parenthood, caregiving, and other family responsibilities. While childcare and eldercare are common areas of support, employees also face other family-related challenges that require more inclusive benefit offerings.
Fertility challenges serve as a prominent example. With infertility affecting one in six people, employees need reproductive-related perks, regardless of their medical condition or relationship status. Yet, 47% of companies lack supportive policies for employees struggling with fertility.
To meet these expectations, employers must go beyond basic health insurance and offer inclusive, family-friendly benefits that cater to diverse family structures. These may include fertility treatments, surrogacy support, childcare subsidies, adoption assistance, parental leave, financial coaching, and eldercare assistance. Investing in these benefits allows companies to ease the burden of family responsibilities, ultimately improving focus and workplace productivity.
Continuous Learning & Career Development
More companies are embracing employee development, recognizing that it reduces skill gaps, improves performance, and boosts retention. As Emmanuel Faith, HR Team Lead at Africhange, affirms, one way to keep employees from leaving is by investing in learning and development “because talents typically stay where they grow and develop.” In fact, 88% of global talent leaders identify providing learning opportunities as a top retention strategy.
As the competition for top talent intensifies in 2025 and beyond, regular training and upskilling will become essential differentiators. For HR and People Ops teams, this means going beyond onboarding to offer career-building initiatives, such as learning stipends, online courses access, tuition reimbursement, career mobility planning, and coaching
How to Evaluate & Improve Your Benefits Stack
Comprehensive benefits are essential to satisfy and retain employees. Here’s how to upgrade your packages to align with trends:
Collect feedback from employees
Gathering feedback through pulse surveys, stay interviews, and one-on-one meetings helps to identify the “specific benefits that will make the biggest impact,” as Priya Krishnan, Chief Digital and Transformation Officer at Bright Horizons, notes. Employee feedback also helps to evaluate the effectiveness of your benefits package.
Vikrant Bhalodia, Head of People Ops at WeblineIndia, agrees, sharing how his company initially offered a generic wellness app based on assumptions about employee needs. However, when they noticed low adoption rates, they turned to employee feedback and improved their offerings for better engagement and satisfaction.
Benchmark your offering against peers
Evaluate your benefits package against industry standards and competitor offerings to stay competitive and enhance your employer branding. This comparison reveals whether your perks are falling behind or on-trend. When your perks are the standard, employees are more likely to stay rather than seek attractive perks elsewhere.
When benchmarking benefits against your competitors, assess all costs and return on investment (ROI) using metrics such as participation rate, cost per employee, improved productivity, and satisfaction scores. Then measure the relevance of perks in relation to your company’s culture, workforce demographics, and business goals.
Evaluate delivery
Reviewing benefit administration helps determine how accessible and valuable your offerings are to workers, not just during initial rollouts but throughout the employee lifecycle. To evaluate perks delivery, monitor metrics like enrollment and utilization rates. Next, gather employee feedback to determine importance and analyze whether the benefits achieve intended outcomes like improved well-being, retention, or engagement.
Assess ROI
Assessing benefit ROI helps businesses measure the effectiveness of reward offerings for better spending. Start by identifying your key objectives in relation to specific business outcomes, such as improving retention, enhancing productivity, or fostering employee engagement. Next, analyze all program-related expenses, including administrative fees, reimbursements, compliance costs, and labor expenses. Once you have a clear understanding of the costs, compare the outcomes of the benefit programs against these expenditures. Use key performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost per employee, employee satisfaction rate, and benefits utilization rate to gauge the program's success and its impact on the bottom line.
Partner with benefit management platforms
According to the Global State of Benefits Report 2025, 70% of global companies lack a unified benefits solution across all locations. Relying on multiple benefit providers can lead to repeated platform sign-ins, fragmented data, and disconnected strategies, creating burdens for HR teams and inconveniences for employees. This fragmentation makes it challenging to offer comprehensive perks, communicate them effectively, and ensure consistent employee engagement across multiple jurisdictions. However, a well-structured benefit management system like RemotePass can turn this challenge into an opportunity.
RemotePass offers customizable, region-specific perks, including premium health insurance, PTO, and financial services, to meet your employees’ diverse needs. Additionally, we provide self-service portals, allowing employees to manage their PTO requests and expenses. This level of access ensures transparency, improves the employee experience, and gives them more control over their workplace perks.
Elevate Your Employee Experience with Compliant Perks
Delivering consistent reward programs across countries is no small feat. Varying labor laws, shifting market standards, evolving employee expectations, and emerging trends make it increasingly challenging for HR teams to design packages that drive company growth.
But tools like RemotePass can simplify the process.
RemotePass provides an all-in-one platform that helps companies deliver globally competitive, flexible, and compliant benefits to their employees. Our platform simplifies benefit delivery, allowing you to seamlessly scale offerings across different regions while ensuring compliance with local regulations. With 7 payout options and 90+ currencies, including direct bank transfers, Wise, the RemotePass debit card, and more, your team has full control over their payments.
Our platform also offers premium benefits like health insurance, customizable paid time off (PTO), and financial wellness support, all accessible through a single, user-friendly app. Employees can easily request, approve, and manage their benefits directly through RemotePass’s intuitive dashboard, giving them full control of their well-being at the touch of a button.
Enhance your benefits delivery and support global talent seamlessly with RemotePass. Sign up to get started.
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