Jordan Peace is the CEO and co-founder of Fringe, a lifestyle benefits company he started in 2018 with four close friends from college. Before Fringe, he was a financial advisor at Northwestern Mutual and the founder of Greenhouse Money, an experience that left him convinced of one thing: most employees, especially Millennials, do not understand the corporate benefits their employer is paying for. Fringe was his attempt to translate benefits into a language people actually speak. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and four kids, and his favorite Fringe benefit is Jeni's Pint Club.
On Reimagining Company Culture, Jordan talked with host Lindsay Tjepkema about the gap between what companies spend on benefits and what employees actually feel from those benefits. The numbers are stark: companies routinely spend 30 to 40 percent of total compensation on benefits, and most employees could not tell you what is in their package. Jordan's argument is that the value of a benefit is determined entirely by whether the employee uses it and feels good about using it.
Why Most Benefits Spend Produces No Engagement
The standard corporate benefits package is a list of line items the average employee saw once, during onboarding, and forgot by Q2. The 401(k) match, the dental plan, the EAP, the wellness stipend, the commuter benefit: each of those is real money on the company's books and almost-invisible value on the employee's experience. SHRM's research on rewards perceptions finds a strong relationship between how employees perceive their total rewards and their overall engagement, and the gap between what is offered and what is perceived is where the spend leaks.
Jordan's framing: a benefit that an employee does not understand or does not use is, from an engagement standpoint, identical to a benefit that does not exist. The dollars left the company. The value never reached the employee. Closing that gap is the most underrated lever in employee benefits design, and it is mostly a question of personalization, communication, and choice.
Why Personalization Changes the Math
Why does personalization matter for benefits?
Because employees are not interchangeable, and a benefits package built for the average employee fits no actual employee particularly well. A new parent values back-up childcare, a recent grad values student-loan support, an employee caring for an aging parent values flexible time and elder-care navigation help. SHRM's reporting on lifestyle spending accounts shows nearly four in ten employers considering LSAs precisely because they let employees route benefits dollars to the categories that matter to them.
How does personalization affect engagement?
Substantially. Personalized recognition and rewards consistently outperform standardized programs in engagement studies, with the O.C. Tanner research cited by SHRM finding that 70 percent of employees report recognition is most meaningful when it is personalized. The same logic applies to benefits: a personalized benefit feels like the company saw you specifically; a generic benefit feels like the company saw a spreadsheet.
What Actually Works
Translate the package into the employee's language
Most benefits administration documentation is written for the broker and the lawyer, not the employee. Jordan's first move with any client is rewriting the benefits explainer in plain English: what the benefit is, who it is for, when to use it, and what it is worth in dollars. That single change tends to lift utilization by double digits in the first quarter.
Give employees choice within the budget
Rather than spending $200 per employee per month on the same wellness app for everyone, give them a $200 monthly allotment they can spend on the wellness, learning, family, or lifestyle category that matters most to them. The total compensation cost is identical. The perceived value is dramatically higher because each employee is choosing the benefit they actually want. Total compensation dollars work harder when employees feel like they are spending them, not receiving them.
Measure utilization and ask why
Every benefit should have a quarterly utilization check. Low utilization is not necessarily a sign of a bad benefit; it might be a communication problem, a discoverability problem, or a fit problem. The only way to tell is to ask. AllVoices' pulse surveys are one of the simpler ways to run a focused benefits-only check-in, segmented by life stage and tenure so the answers actually mean something.
Where Employee Relations Fits Into Benefits Engagement
Benefits questions and complaints are one of the most common categories of inbound HR work, and they often surface deeper issues. An employee who cannot get a question answered about their parental leave is also an employee whose trust in the company is eroding in real time. AllVoices works with HR teams on the case management and reporting infrastructure that turns those questions into trackable cases rather than email threads that fall through the cracks.
Why ER tooling matters for benefits experience
If your team is fielding the same five benefits questions a hundred times a quarter, that is a signal worth seeing. AllVoices' HR case management system tags benefits-related cases so the team can spot the recurring questions, route them to better self-service content, and surface the gaps in plan design that keep generating tickets. Wellness programs in particular tend to live or die based on how easy they are to actually use, and the case data is the fastest way to find the friction.
Frequently Asked Questions About Employee Engagement and Benefits
What is the link between benefits and employee engagement?
A direct one. Employees who understand and use their benefits report higher engagement and higher perceived total compensation, even when actual dollars are unchanged. The link runs through perception: engagement is influenced more by what employees know and feel about their benefits than by the dollar value of the package.
What are lifestyle benefits and why are they growing?
Lifestyle benefits are flexible-spending allowances that employees can direct toward categories like wellness, family support, learning, travel, or charitable giving. They are growing because they solve the personalization problem at scale: the company sets a budget and the employee makes the choice, which makes the spend feel personal.
How should HR communicate benefits to drive engagement?
Continuously, in plain English, and segmented by life stage. A single onboarding session and a 60-page PDF are not enough. The companies that get this right run quarterly, topic-specific benefits content, send life-stage-relevant nudges (new parent, new grad, near-retirement), and treat benefits communication as a recurring program rather than a launch.
What are fringe benefits, and how do they differ from core benefits?
Core benefits are the standard offerings: medical, dental, vision, retirement, life insurance, paid time off. Fringe benefits are everything beyond that, from commuter assistance and gym stipends to lifestyle spending accounts and student loan support. Fringe benefits are where most personalization happens because the categories are more flexible.
How do you measure whether a benefits program is working?
Three numbers: utilization (what percentage of eligible employees used it), perceived value (do employees rate it positively), and retention correlation (do users stay longer than non-users). Together they tell you whether the spend is producing engagement, not just appearing on the benefits page.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Jordan's argument is that the benefits-engagement gap is mostly a design problem, not a budget problem. Companies are already spending the dollars; the work is making sure those dollars produce a feeling of being valued, supported, and seen. That requires personalization, plain-language communication, and a willingness to measure utilization honestly and rebuild benefits that are not landing.
For HR leaders, the highest-return changes are often the cheapest. Rewrite the benefits guide. Add a quarterly benefits pulse. Pilot a lifestyle spending account in one office before rolling it out company-wide. The companies that take this seriously end up with the same benefits budget producing twice the engagement of companies that treat benefits as a once-a-year enrollment event.
If you want to see how AllVoices supports the listening, case management, and reporting infrastructure behind a high-engagement benefits program, book a tailored walkthrough with our team.
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