Most employee experiences, including benefits, are still designed for people who sit behind desks.
The problem is, most employees don’t.
An estimated 70–80% of the global workforce is deskless, spanning industries like retail, healthcare, logistics, hospitality, and manufacturing. Yet many of the systems meant to engage them – email campaigns, HR portals, intranets, and enrollment communications – still assume regular access to a company computer and corporate email account.
For many frontline workers, that access simply doesn’t exist. They rely on personal devices, shared workstations, or paper-based processes to navigate their day. As a result, organizations often face a quiet but significant challenge: benefits may be available in theory, but inaccessible in practice.
The consequences are substantial. Employers invest heavily in benefits, yet utilization frequently falls short of expectations. Not necessarily because employees don’t value what’s being offered, but because accessing those benefits often requires effort that doesn’t fit naturally into the realities of their day-to-day lives.
For organizations with large deskless populations, the challenge isn’t simply offering better benefits. It’s making benefits genuinely accessible.
Availability Isn’t Access
“I think the biggest gap in benefit accessibility is the mismatch between how benefits have traditionally been delivered versus the way people live and work today,” says Patrick Dias, who leads user-facing product experiences at PerkSpot. “A lot of benefits haven’t really caught up.”
For decades, the benefits industry has optimized for administration. If a program was available, communicated during enrollment, and housed somewhere employees could theoretically find it later, the job was considered done.
From an employer’s perspective, that can look like success. But from an employee’s perspective, it’s a different story.
Dias sees this disconnect as one of the industry’s most persistent blind spots. For too long, availability has been treated as the finish line rather than the starting point. A benefit may be available. It may have been announced. It may live on an HR portal somewhere. But none of those things guarantee that an employee can easily find it, access it, or use it when they actually need it.
“Availability is not the same as access,” says Dias. “Access is not just distribution or a link on a page. It’s about the actual experience with the benefit.”
That distinction becomes especially important for deskless workers.
Their days aren’t structured around inboxes, intranets, and enrollment portals. They’re helping customers, stocking shelves, caring for patients, operating equipment, or moving between job sites. Benefits often exist outside the flow of their daily lives.
Dias points to a common scenario: asking an employee to remember an email they received weeks ago, log into an HR system, search for a discount, and navigate multiple screens before finally accessing the benefit.
Technically, the benefit exists. Practically, many employees won’t use it.
The companies making the most progress have realized something important: access is no longer a distribution problem. It’s an experience problem. And once you recognize that, the next question becomes obvious: what should benefits experiences actually be designed around?
Designing for Moments, Not Channels
Many conversations about accessibility start with channels.
Should the experience live on desktop or mobile? Should there be an app? Should communication happen through email, text, or push notifications?
For Dias, those questions are secondary. Instead of designing around channels, PerkSpot’s product team focuses on designing around moments.
“For a deskless worker, they’re likely using a benefit during breaks, between shifts, commuting, standing in line,” Dias explains. “It’s likely on a personal device, they might only have a few minutes.”
That reality changes how products need to be built.
The challenge isn’t simply making benefits available on mobile devices. It’s understanding the circumstances in which employees are trying to use them. They may have limited time, they may not remember a password, and they may be balancing family responsibilities, work demands, and everything else happening around them.
In that context, convenience isn’t a feature. It’s a requirement. Every additional step creates friction, and every moment of confusion increases the likelihood that an employee simply moves on.
As a result, PerkSpot’s product philosophy centers on removing as much unnecessary effort as possible. That means simplifying authentication, reducing the number of actions required to redeem an offer, and helping employees reach value faster without having to search for it.
Rather than asking, “How do we get employees to use this benefit?” the more useful question becomes, “What is the employee trying to accomplish right now?”
That shift sounds simple, but in practice, it changes everything; from how products are designed to how success is measured.
What That Looks Like in Practice
Several years ago, PerkSpot’s team noticed something surprising in its mobile app data. Employees were purchasing thousands of movie tickets through the app despite an experience that Dias openly describes as less than ideal at the time. Users encountered multiple login prompts, were pushed outside the app to complete certain actions, and faced unnecessary friction throughout the process.
Yet they kept coming back.
For Dias and his team, that revealed something important. The takeaway wasn’t that the experience was working – it was that the need was real.
“We don’t just start off by asking what features can we put in the mobile app,” Dias says. “We actually take a look at what users are attempting to do and think about how we can make that simpler and easier.”
Rather than redesigning the entire app, the team focused on a specific, high-volume user journey and worked backward from the employee’s perspective. Using a Jobs To Be Done framework, they asked a different question: What was the employee actually trying to accomplish?
The answer wasn’t “buy movie tickets.”
“The story there is not that a user wants to buy movie tickets,” Dias explains. “A user’s at the theater with their family, and they need to quickly access their ticket so they can move on to the candy for the kids, buy the soda, get into the theater before the movie starts.”
That distinction may seem subtle, but it fundamentally changes the design challenge. Once the team understood the actual job employees were trying to get done, the path forward became clearer: simplify purchasing, reduce login friction, and make tickets easier to access in the moment they were needed.
The lesson extends far beyond movie tickets. The most effective employee experiences aren’t built around features or functionality alone. They’re built around the real-world situations in which employees actually use them.
And that same philosophy shows up in another place where employees frequently encounter friction: online shopping.
Meeting Employees Where They Already Are
Traditional benefits programs often require employees to remember they exist. An employee decides to make a purchase, remembers a benefit might help them save money, searches for the program, logs in, and then attempts to redeem the offer. Every additional step creates another opportunity for disengagement.
PerkSpot’s browser extension – a small tool that works directly within a user’s web browser to automatically surface available savings while employees shop online – was built around a different assumption: employees shouldn’t have to remember their benefits in order to use them.
As Dias puts it, “Most people are not thinking when they’re shopping online, ‘I should go to my work’s intranet.'” They’re already focused on the task at hand. The opportunity, he argues, is to bring the benefit into that existing behavior rather than asking employees to interrupt it.
“Our goal is to be there at the moment that they want to purchase,” he says.
Rather than requiring employees to seek out savings, the browser extension surfaces them directly within the shopping experience itself. The benefit becomes part of a behavior that’s already happening naturally, reducing the effort required to discover and redeem value.
That observation points to a broader shift taking place across employee benefits. The future isn’t about asking employees to work harder to use benefits; it’s about embedding benefits into the moments and environments where employees already spend their time.
In many ways, that’s the difference between offering a benefit and making one usable.
What Actually Drives Utilization
When utilization falls short, the instinctive response is often more communication: more reminders, more campaigns, and more awareness initiatives designed to keep benefits top of mind.
But Dias believes utilization issues are frequently misdiagnosed.
When asked what drives meaningful engagement, he points to three factors: relevance, timing, and ease. Those ideas appear repeatedly throughout PerkSpot’s product strategy because they align with how people naturally behave.
Employees return to benefits when they consistently experience value. And value isn’t just about the savings itself. It’s about how effortlessly those savings can be accessed.
“It’s way more than just messages and pushes,” Dias says. “If you do too much of that stuff, it feels like noise.”
Instead, the goal is to surface value at the right moment, when it feels helpful rather than promotional.
“If we surface savings at the right moment, it can actually feel really helpful,” he says. “That’s the difference between a product feeling promotional and pushy versus something that’s assistive and helpful.”
It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. A benefit that requires employees to change their behavior will always face adoption challenges. A benefit that fits naturally into existing behavior, by contrast, has a much better chance of becoming part of everyday life.
That principle applies whether an employee works behind a desk, on a sales floor, in a hospital, or on a manufacturing line. The easier benefits are to discover, access, and use, the more likely employees are to keep coming back.
Building Less to Deliver More
One of the most counterintuitive lessons in product design is that creating better experiences often requires building fewer things.
“The best experience is the simplest one,” Dias says.
Simple experiences are easy to appreciate but surprisingly difficult to create. Every feature added to a product introduces complexity, every new workflow creates something employees must learn, and every additional option increases the possibility of confusion.
For deskless workers, that complexity carries an even greater cost. Simplicity isn’t just a design preference; it’s a prerequisite for adoption.
That’s why PerkSpot’s product team spends as much time deciding what not to build as what to build. Rather than redesigning entire products at once, the team focuses on high-impact, high-friction moments where improvements can create meaningful value.
The goal isn’t to overwhelm users with features. It’s to remove obstacles standing between employees and the value they’re already entitled to receive. Ultimately, that’s the challenge facing benefits leaders today. The issue isn’t simply expanding access; it’s redefining what access means.
For the deskless workforce, benefits rarely fail because they don’t exist. More often, they fail because they’re difficult to discover, access, or use in the moments that matter most. Or, as Dias puts it, “Products and services are here to serve you when you need them, not the other way around.”
The organizations that embrace that shift will be the ones that turn benefits from something employees know about into something they actually use.
Note: Some responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.