Buried Benefits: What Employees Don't Know They're Owed
36% of workers are left to find their own benefits.
Somewhere in most UK companies there is a benefits page very few have opened since induction week. It is nicely worded, words on point, sitting on the intranet exactly where policy says it should. New research suggests that page is doing a great deal less work than anyone in HR has assumed. What GRiD Found Group Risk Development (GRiD), the UK trade body for group risk benefits, published findings in early September 2026 drawn from an Opinium survey of 500 HR decision-makers and 1,210 nationally representative UK workers. Katharine Moxham, GRiD's spokesperson, and Colin Fitzgerald, GRiD's chairman and Distribution Director at Legal & General Retail, are the named voices on the release. The numbers: 36% of employees say benefits take-up is left entirely to them to initiate. Only 29% say their employer actively encourages usage. Just 18% say they fully understand all the benefits on offer to them. One thing worth stating plainly, in the interest of not overselling this as breaking news: the fieldwork behind those figures ran in January 2026, roughly eight months before GRiD published it. The publication is fresh this week. The underlying data collection is not. That gap does not undo the finding, but it is worth knowing before anyone treats this as a snapshot of September behaviour rather than a January one. Why This Gap Costs Something Real Every unclaimed benefit is a policy the employer is already paying for and getting no credit for, and, for the employee, protection s…