Savings Week: the science of a benefit that actually lands
By Andy Robbins, Senior Employment Benefits Consultant at Mattioli Woods

 

To mark Savings Week from 21 to 27 September, Andy Robbins at Mattioli Woods argues that the biggest barrier to a valued benefits package is not budget or design, but human psychology – and looks at what the science tells employers to do about it.

Every year, employers invest significant time and money in designing benefits packages they hope their people will value. Yet a stubborn gap often remains between what is offered and what employees understand, engage with and ultimately use. It’s tempting to blame poor communication or crowded inboxes but there’s a more interesting, and potentially more useful, explanation: our brains are wired in ways that can make good financial decisions surprisingly difficult. When it comes to pensions and long-term saving, those behavioural biases can be particularly powerful.

Understanding why is the first step to designing communication that actually lands. Here are three questions to ask your team.

 

Do your people actually understand what you offer?

Start with the most uncomfortable question, because the honest answer is often no. Recent research found that just 21% of employees felt they had a very good understanding of all the health and wellbeing benefits available to them, and yet 57% of employers believed their staff fully understood what was on offer.1

This mismatch has a name: psychologists call it the ‘curse of knowledge’. Once you know something inside out, it becomes surprisingly difficult to imagine what it feels like not to know it. Reward and HR teams live and breathe their benefits, so it’s easy to assume everyone else understands them too. This isn’t complacency but a well-documented cognitive bias and can make the gap between what employers communicate and what employees understand almost invisible from the inside.

The lesson from behavioural science is simple: clarity has to be designed, not assumed. What feels obvious to the people who created a benefits package will rarely feel equally obvious to the people receiving it. The challenge is to see the package through their eyes and communicate from there.

Do you have an engagement strategy, or just a benefits package? 

The second question separates provision from engagement. A 2025 survey found that 29% of employers have no engagement strategy at all, though a further 26% intend to introduce one.2

That final figure is, in itself, a tidy example of behavioural science at work. There’s a well-studied phenomenon called the intention-action gap: people, and organisations, sincerely intend to do the sensible thing but then don’t quite get round to it. A quarter of employers meaning to build a strategy is encouraging, but intention rarely converts into action on its own. It needs a prompt, a deadline and an owner.

The reassuring part is that the same science offers the fix. The single most successful pensions policy of the last two decades – automatic enrolment – works precisely because it stopped relying on people to act and redesigned the default instead. Auto-enrolment is behavioural science made real. It didn’t lecture people into saving; instead it made saving the path of least resistance. The same principle applies to any benefit. Design the journey around how people actually behave, not how we wish they did.

 

How do you know it’s working?

The third question is about evidence, and here pensions present the hardest problem of all. The value of a pension sits decades in the future, and the human brain is remarkably bad at valuing the future. Behavioural economists call it present bias: a pound today feels far more real than a much larger sum in thirty years. It’s why people disengage from the very benefit that may matter most to them.

There’s a striking strand of research suggesting that we treat our future selves almost like strangers. It helps explain why saving for retirement can feel strangely like giving money away: the person who benefits from today’s decision feels distant and abstract. Once you understand that, communication needs to change. The aim is to make the future feel closer, more tangible and more real, to help people see the person they’re actually saving for. During Savings Week, that’s worth remembering. The benefits people need to understand most are the ones their own psychology quietly encourages them to ignore.

The employers who get the most from their spend are the ones who treat engagement as something to measure and test rather than assume – looking at take-up, asking people what they genuinely understand, and adjusting accordingly.

If there’s one message for employers this Savings Week, it’s that good benefits are not enough on their own. The science is clear: people don’t make perfectly rational decisions about money, time or the future. Once you accept that, you stop blaming the audience and start designing communication that works with human nature rather than against it. That’s what turns a cost into something your people genuinely value.

Sources

Behavioural-science concepts referenced:

  • Curse of knowledge: an established cognitive bias, generally attributed to Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber (1989).
  • Intention-action (or intention-behaviour) gap: a well-established idea in behavioural psychology.
  • Automatic enrolment as a behavioural “default”/nudge: widely discussed in Thaler and Sunstein’s work on nudge theory.
  • Present bias/temporal discounting and the “future self” research: the future-self strand is associated with work by Hal Hershfield and colleagues.


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