Employee Benefits Platform vs Intranet: Which is Better for Your Workforce?

When an organisation needs somewhere to put its employee benefits, the intranet is often the obvious choice. It’s already part of the business. Policies, documents and company news live there. Adding a ‘pay and benefits’ hub can feel like a practical way to give employees one place to find everything.

But there’s a question that’s surprisingly easy to miss: Can every employee access it?

I recently spoke to an organisation that had built a benefits hub in their intranet, a SharePoint site. Many of their employees work at a desk, so it was an understandable choice. But they also have a considerable number of colleagues in deskless roles. When I asked whether those employees could access the hub, they weren’t sure. It wasn’t something they’d thought to check.

I can understand how that happens. If you spend your working day on a company laptop, signed into Microsoft 365, opening a SharePoint page feels effortless. It’s easy to assume the same is true across the organisation.

But in a workforce with a mix of desk-based and deskless roles, the experience can vary considerably. A colleague working on a shop floor, on a university campus, in a hotel or out in the field may not have the same device, account or straightforward route in.

Think about how often people have a reason to return

Most employees won’t visit a benefits page every week simply to see whether anything has changed. That creates a challenge for any benefits hub, wherever it lives: how do people discover the value that’s there over time?

This is where the wider employee experience matters. Everyday savings give people a reason to come back. Recognition and reward create moments when employees engage with the platform for a different purpose. Communications can bring attention to a benefit when it is relevant, rather than relying on someone to search for it later.

These things fit together from the employee’s point of view. They are all part of what it feels like to work for an organisation and what they receive in return. But it’s common to find benefits on the intranet, recognition in one system, reward in another and discounts somewhere else again.

Each choice may have made sense at the time. Together, they can leave employees with several destinations to remember and HR with several programmes to manage.

Bringing benefits, recognition and reward into a more connected experience won’t automatically make people use them. It does, however, give an organisation a better chance to introduce them together, communicate them consistently and see where employees are engaging.

If you manage Reward or Benefits, you don’t need to start by proposing a new platform. Start by testing the journey you already have. Bring IT and Comms into the conversation and ask: