Key Takeaways
- When employees cite pay as their reason for leaving, the underlying issue is often not salary itself, but a total rewards package that has fallen behind market without anyone flagging it, so the fix may live in benefits design rather than payroll alone.
- A salary increase is a permanent, compounding cost. A benefits redesign can address the same compensation gap with more flexibility, which makes it worth evaluating before defaulting to across-the-board raises.
- Most internal HR teams do not have visibility into how their plan compares to similar employers, so compensation concerns often go unaddressed for lack of a recent benchmark, not for lack of budget.
Nearly a quarter of Canadian workers plan to leave their jobs this year, according to leading research surveying more than 3,500 Canadian workers. Among those planning to leave, compensation deemed too low is the most common reason cited, at 48 percent.
For plan sponsors, that statistic should reframe how employee benefit solutions get positioned internally. Compensation is the full value an employer delivers, not just base salary, and benefits make up a real share of that value, whether employees see them that way or not.
Salary Is Only Part of the Compensation Story
Almost half of departing employees cite pay. The instinctive response, raising salaries across the board, is expensive and only solves part of the problem.
Total rewards thinking treats compensation as a full package, base pay, health and wellness coverage, employee savings plans, disability protection, and plan flexibility, rather than a single number on an offer letter. An employee who feels underpaid is not always underpaid in salary terms. More often, their employer’s total rewards package has quietly fallen behind, and they feel that gap before they can name it.
This gives plan sponsors a second lever, not a replacement for salary increases, but a way to close part of the same gap without the same permanent, compounding cost. For a plan that has not been benchmarked recently, this second lever often has the most room to move.
How an Employee Benefits Consultant Closes the Gap
A benefits plan treated as an afterthought rarely moves the needle on retention. One built as a deliberate part of total compensation usually does.
This starts with an honest audit, not a guess. Where does the current plan fall short of what comparable employers are offering? Where is spend concentrated on coverage employees barely notice, while real gaps sit untouched in the areas most likely to push someone toward the exit?
Most internal HR teams simply do not have the market data or the bandwidth to benchmark a plan against a shifting labour market. This is where a consultant’s value shows up: comparing the plan against similar employers, then flagging underused coverage and gaps tied to the compensation concerns raised in exit conversations. A benefits redesign is often a more targeted response than an across-the-board salary increase, and one that addresses the specific gaps most likely driving turnover.
The result, done well, is an employee benefits program that plan sponsors can point to with confidence, not just a binder of coverage nobody has reviewed since it was first put in place.
Working With Benchmark Benefits
Benchmark Benefits has spent twenty years helping Canadian plan sponsors close the gap between what a benefits plan promises and what it actually delivers, building employee benefit solutions around real market data and the specific pressures a workforce faces, rather than defaulting to a standard package and hoping it holds up at renewal.
For plan sponsors trying to understand whether compensation concerns are showing up because of pay, benefits, or both, that kind of grounded, current perspective is difficult to build alone.