What we learned at Employee Benefits Live 2026

We spent two days on stand D50 at Employee Benefits Live 2026 at ExCeL London. Why? Because it's a great place to meet people who actually care about giving their team a great employee experience. And all the free merch, of course. But while our sales team was busy singing Huggg's praises, some of us managed to sneak off to a few of the talks.

There were a lot of big names (including an actual Gladiators cast member!), a lot of impressive topics - but no matter the variation, one theme kept on coming up again and again. The biggest challenge around employee benefits isn't budget. It's actually an access problem, a listening problem and a "do people genuinely feel noticed" problem. The bad news is that makes it slightly more complicated. The good news is that it means it's actually solvable, even if you only have a couple of quid to show how valued your team is. 

Here's what we took from the talks, what HR teams told us on the stand, and what we think it says.

The short version: the most common answer to "what makes a bad boss?" is one who doesn't show appreciation. Benefits that are hard to claim don't get used. Listening only works if you find the real problem before you fix anything. And deskless, long-serving and multi-generational teams don't so much need different benefits as easier, more flexible ones.

1. Appreciation is the gap people notice first

First up, "The engagement challenge employers can't ignore" - a session run by Debra Corey, best-selling author and chief pay it forward officer at Step It Up HR. Kicked it off by outlining the three managers most HR teams will recognise:

• The one who says training hasn't working, so you need to arrange more of it
• The one absolutely shocked by attrition, wondering it could have been avoided by a salary bump
• The one who can't get their team involved and wants ANOTHER survey to find out why

She also revealed that when employees are asked what makes a bad boss, the most common answer is one who's unappreciative. Training, pay and surveys all have their place. But none of them is a thank you.

She was also clear that engagement isn't HR's job alone. It takes managers, employees and HR working on it together.

One question from the audience stuck with us: how do you handle it when your budget can't stretch to what employees ask for? Her answer was to be transparent. Tell people what's possible, and why.

What we'd do with it: make it easy for managers to recognise people in the moment. If saying thanks needs a form, an approval and a budget code, let's be real - it's just not going to happen. 

2. If it's hard to claim, it doesn't count

Debra also told the story of a company that gave its people free books. Fantastic perk! Literacy for the win! A clear sign that you see your employees as people, not just profit-making machines! The trouble was that claiming said free books was such a faff that hardly anyone actually bothered. 

On a separate panel, an organisation described bringing in a highly comprehensive dental scheme. As anyone who's left their dentists feeling slightly sick and hurriedly changing their plans to go out for dinner that night, they'll understand that's a fab perk. But the admin it took to set up outweighed the number of people who ever used it. Bummer.

Both were generous ideas. Both sort of flopped. And why is that? Because engagement im benefits needs an easy process and the right conditions, not just good intentions.

What we'd do with it: before you launch anything, try claiming it yourself, as an employee would. Count the steps. If you lose patience, so will they.

3. Listening isn't the same as fixing

Simon Andrew's session on solving the wrong problems started with an analogy everyone in the room recognised. When your partner comes home after the world's worst day (held tube, exploding tupperware, grumpy boss, major system failure), the best first question is "do you want me to listen, or do you want help fixing it?" Jumping straight to a solution - especially when they may not BE one - doesn't really help.

He then told some real-life work stories about some wrong assumptions he had to challenge:

• A cabin crew team was disengaged. The assumption was that they weren't connecting with each other. The real reason was that management kept ignoring their pushback on decisions that affected their day-to-day work, making their lives kind of a nightmare - at 30,000 feet, to boot.
• A team going through a restructure looked like it had a motivation problem. But... it was actually a trust problem. There had broken promise after broken promise, and people felt lied to and unseen.

His process for getting it right:

1. Challenge what you think you know
2. Listen properly, through data, workshops and interviews
3. Draft ideas
4. Propose solutions
5. Test them
6. Ask employees to challenge them
7. Commit to your next steps with confidence

What we'd do with it: before launching a new perk to fix low engagement, check it's the perk people are actually missing. Sometimes it's being heard.

4. Deskless teams don't have time to go looking

A panel with speakers from Heinz and Coventry University focused on deskless workers and highlighted the things that traditional HR tends to forget - despite their best intentions.

Their main challenges:

• Deskless staff often don't have a laptop, so portals and intranets pass them by
• They don't have time in a shift to go looking for benefits
• Comms need to be multi-channel, because one email won't reach them
• Shift patterns and needs like childcare look different from office life

The sharpest point was that it's less about different needs and more about different usage. A gym membership is a good perk for a city team. For a rural site where the nearest gym isn't near at all, it's worth nothing.

They recommended running a proper benefits survey to find out what's actually useful, and making sure people know exactly where to go for information and support.

What we'd do with it: if a benefit can't be opened on a phone during a break, assume most of your frontline will never see it.

5. Long-serving staff can drift, and it's fixable

Open source software company SUSE shared that around a third of its workforce is over 50, mostly with long tenure. When they looked at the data, that group was significantly less engaged than their younger colleagues.

So they built a programme called Future Selves. It gave people the time and tools to work out what they still want, across four areas: career, hobbies, personal values and lifestyle.

It ran in stages: looking back at the past, taking stock of the present, exploring the future and setting goals. They said it worked well.

What we'd do with it: for long-serving people, being asked "what next?" is a form of recognition in itself. It's attention, not another perk.

6. Life stage matters more than generation

Channel 4's talk on the multi-generational workforce pushed back on the usual generational labels. Their view is that people differ more by life stage than by birth year.

Across those life stages, the same priorities keep surfacing: flexibility, fair pay and financial security.

Then came the part we found most interesting. More benefit options isn't the answer, because a long menu confuses people. What works is structure, a group of people who own it and regular reviews of the data.

What we'd do with it: offer choice within a short, considered selection. Choice is good. An endless list isn't.

What HR teams told us on the stand

The talks were half of it. The other half was the conversations at D50, and they lined up with the stages surprisingly well. We've kept everyone anonymous.

"It's all manual." When we asked people what they use now, that was the most common answer. One person sends coffee vouchers to 900 people, one at a time. Another team runs recognition through an online form that brings in thousands of nominations a month, all sifted by hand. Someone else spent three days sourcing, wrapping and posting a single round of client gifts. Oof.

Platforms nobody uses. More than one team told us they pay for a recognition platform and "nobody logs in". One said their instinct was to add more options to win people back, and they already knew that would make it harder.

Christmas fairness. We heard about a festive raffle where a few people win something big and everyone else gets a lot less, chocolate for everyone when not everyone eats chocolate, and gifts that went missing in the post last year.

Managers want to say thanks without asking HR. Manager budgets came up again and again. And again. And then even more. So did the flip side: leadership nervous that budgets would be misused.

Budgets are tight. Universities, care providers and businesses with a lot of minimum wage staff all wanted low-value options that still feel like something.

Put those next to the talks and it's the same story told from the other side. Appreciation is missing, the process is the problem, and adding more doesn't help. 

Six questions to ask before you add a benefit

Pulling it all together, here's the checklist we'd run any new benefit through:

1. Have we checked this is the problem people actually have?
2. How many steps does it take to actually use it?
3. Can someone on a shift, without a laptop, get to it on their phone?
4. Does it work for people outside a city?
5. Does it suit people at different life stages, or just one?
6. Who's going to look at the take-up data, and when?

If you can't answer one of these, that's usually where take-up will leak.

Where Huggg fits

We're a gifting platform, not a benefits provider, so we won't pretend we solve all six. But gifting is one of the simplest ways for a manager to show appreciation, and the same lessons apply.

A gift with choice is a link. It opens on a phone, with no app, no login and no address needed. You set the budget and the selection, and the person receiving it picks what works for their life. It's great for office-based and deskless workers alike, and since no prices are seen by employees, they feel recognised without feeling like their contributions have a monetary value attached.

We were chuffed that people noticed. Comms agency brazil™ singled us out on LinkedIn for being clear about what we're not: "No admin. No addresses. No unwanted gifts." That's the whole idea.

The platform is free, and you only pay for the gifts you send. See how Huggg works.

Thanks to everyone who came to say hello at D50, and to the speakers for giving us plenty to think about.