Diverging employee survey results show employees can be both happy about pay and underwhelmed by benefits. That was a top takeaway from the 2025 Madison Top Workplaces employee survey data, particularly when employees were asked what they felt positive about over the past year, with surveys wrapping up around the beginning of December.
“It’s really interesting that the most positive change was about pay — and the most negative change was about benefits,” said Bob Helbig, media partnerships director for Energage, which conducts employee surveys used to select Top Workplaces. Sentiment around pay and benefits tends to track together — “usually those things go hand in hand,” Helbig noted — but not so in the latest local results.
Energage gauged employees’ positivity (or lack thereof) around a variety of factors, based on their agreement with simple statements. For example, “My pay is fair for the work I do.” For that one, 65.5% of the participating Madison-area employees who responded to Energage’s workplace surveys were positive, up 2.2% percentage points from 63.3% the previous year. It was the biggest change in a positive direction across more than 20 factors measured, ranging from whether employees get the formal training they want for their career (71.2% felt positive about that, up 0.6 percentage points from the previous year) to if they had a “manager who cares about my concerns” (83.4% positive, nearly identical to the previous year’s result of 83.5%).
By contrast, just over half of employees were happy about their benefits relative to what they perceived they might get elsewhere. That was based on their agreement or disagreement with the statement, “My benefits package is good compared to others in this industry.” The positivity score among surveyed employees was 52.2%, down 4.7 percentage points from 56.9% for the previous year.
Benefits can get complicated
No follow-up questions were asked to drill down into why workers in the region might be more pumped about pay — or at least OK with it — and yet decidedly less enthusiastic about benefits. Still, some universal themes are likely at play, according to Helbig.
To start, even as payroll is the top expense for employers, benefits are getting costlier all the time. “Companies face a challenge certainly around health care costs — and employees have high expectations for benefits,” Helbig said. As insurance premiums and medical costs continue to rise, that cost pressure on employers and employees is only increasing. Employers might pay more for insurance while still passing on an increasing amount to employees in the form of high deductibles and other cost sharing.
“I think that’s going to remain a big challenge for every company in terms of what benefits they are offering, how generous those benefits are and how they are meeting the needs of employees,” Helbig said.
Experts say what benefits are available and how to access them is something every employer can do to improve the employee experience as well.
Tanya Hubanks, director of the Strategic Human Resource Management Center at the Wisconsin School of Business in Madison, adds that understanding what individual employees want is also important, whether it’s paid time off to volunteer (VTO) or a better 401K match.
But employers must go further to communicate effectively what’s offered, she emphasized. “Pay is easy, right? You know what it is. It’s what’s in your paycheck.” But with benefits, there’s so much that can go into it, Hubanks said, and different people look at it differently.
Other factors affect satisfaction
While it might not always be placed squarely in the benefits category, work-life balance is nearly universally valued by employees, according to the Top Workplace surveys. In the Madison region, 80.5% agreed that they had the flexibility they needed to balance their work and personal life. But many still feel like they will fall behind if they take time off or have trouble disconnecting outside of work, Helbig said.
“The biggest obstacles to work-life flexibility include self-imposed expectations, heavy workloads, last-minute requests, customer expectations and understaffing,” he noted. “This suggests deeper cultural and organizational changes to truly support employee work-life flexibility.”
Many managers and employees are also struggling with bigger workloads as employers try to get more done with less staff. Across the country, “hiring has cooled, so I think organizations are dealing a lot right now with how to get the most out of their people,” Helbig said.
That means employees are acutely aware not only of work creeping in on their personal lives, but when they’re not being as productive as they could be on the job. To that end, many aren’t convinced they should be in that meeting at all. Put another way, just 65.9% of employees surveyed in the Madison area agree: “Meetings at this company make good use of my time.”
Coming or going?
While some attrition is a reality for all employers, ignoring employees’ needs and wants as it relates to everything from benefits to work-life balance can be especially costly.
Where a lot of employers are having remote workers return to the office, for example, many employees still prize having some flexibility — like a hybrid arrangement that allows them to work from home and avoid a heavily trafficked commute at least a couple days a week.
“Our outlook on that is that there’s no perfect answer … organizations need to look at specific roles and specific circumstances to figure out what makes sense,” Helbig said.
The same could be said for any number of factors affecting employee satisfaction — which ultimately impacts retention and performance.
“What we do know,” Helbig emphasized, “is that the organizations that are willing to be flexible and experiment are going to attract employees that will want to work there and give their best.”
