Barry Waring: ‘We need to change the way we talk about employee benefits’

After more than two decades working across group risk, insurance and employee benefits, Barry Waring believes the industry has a communication problem.

Employers are being offered an expanding range of products, platforms and wellbeing services, but Waring argues that the conversation too often starts with what those products do rather than the workforce problem an employer is trying to solve.

It is something he now wants to challenge through BW Consulting, the business he established this year after leaving YuLife in 2025.

For Waring, the ultimate outcome is relatively simple: helping more people stay healthy, financially resilient and in work.

“Part of the problem”, he argues, “is that employee benefits can become an exercise in following what everybody else is doing.” He points to employee assistance programmes (EAPs) as an example. “Employers may have them because they are an established part of a benefits package, yet utilisation can remain low,” he adds.

The bigger question, therefore, is not simply whether an employer offers a benefit, but whether it addresses a genuine workforce need and whether employees understand when and why to use it.

That distinction becomes particularly important for small and medium-sized employers. Waring believes these businesses are unlikely to be persuaded by insurance terminology alone. They need to understand the outcome they are buying.

Income protection is one area where he sees significant potential. “Traditionally associated with providing financial support during longer-term absence”, he says. Waring believes the proposition should increasingly encompass what happens much earlier in an employee’s health journey.

“The first 12 weeks of absence can be critical. Rather than waiting until somebody reaches the point at which an income protection payment becomes relevant”, he explains, adding that he sees an opportunity for insurers: “wellbeing services and employers to intervene sooner, assess what an employee needs and support their return to work. It puts workplace wellbeing much closer to the core purpose of insurance.”

Waring has spent more than 20 years in the sector, beginning his career at Legal & General before moving through sales and leadership roles at businesses including Omnilife and Scottish Life, now Royal London. His career eventually brought him to YuLife, where he spent several years developing the company’s broker distribution and establishing strategic partnerships with 10 brokers. 

The experience reinforced something that remains central to his approach today: relationships matter. But it also demonstrated the potential to communicate traditionally complex insurance products differently.

That thinking is now feeding directly into BW Consulting. Waring believes there is a sizeable opportunity to make group risk and workplace health products easier for employers and employees to understand, while helping providers build stronger relationships with the broker market.

With long-term sickness and economic inactivity remaining major challenges for the UK, Waring believes group income protection could have a much bigger role in helping employers retain people who might otherwise leave the workforce.

But that requires the industry to explain its value differently. “The next generation of employee benefits,” he argues, “should be less focused on industry jargon and more focused on outcomes: whether people receive appropriate support, whether absence can be shortened and whether employees are successfully helped back into work.”

That philosophy also influences how he thinks employers should spend limited wellbeing and benefits budgets.

“Cash plans can provide employees with an immediate, tangible benefit, particularly around everyday costs such as dental care,” Waring says. “Life assurance can offer relatively low-cost protection, while private medical insurance provides valuable healthcare access but at a significantly greater cost. Income protection has a different role: protecting both the individual and the organisation when ill health threatens someone’s ability to work.”

For Waring, this is not an argument for continually adding more benefits. It is an argument for making the benefits employers already buy easier to understand, easier to access and more closely connected to the health and workforce outcomes organisations actually need.

His plans for BW Consulting reflect that. Alongside fractional sales and distribution support for businesses operating across insurance, healthcare and wellbeing, he is developing the BW Sales Academy, focused on improving sales capability and helping businesses communicate more effectively with brokers and employers.

He also continues to work closely with the group risk market, including through his role as chair of the Raising The Profile Committee for Group Risk Development (GRiD) and he sits on another Steering Group. 

After a career spent selling into a market he now wants to help change, Waring’s central challenge to the sector is straightforward.

“Workplace wellbeing and employee benefits should not be judged simply by how many products an employer has bought, or how many people have downloaded an app,” he says. “The more important question is what happened next.

“Did somebody receive help earlier? Did they return to work? Did a business retain an employee it might otherwise have lost?”

For a UK workforce facing growing pressures from ill health and long-term absence, those are increasingly the outcomes that matter.

After a career spent selling into a market Waring now wants to help bring about change. He believes one of the biggest opportunities is to rethink how the industry communicates its value.

He says: “Change starts with moving away from product language. Rather than leading with policy features, platforms or lists of services, providers should start with the problem an employer is trying to solve and explain clearly what will be different as a result.”

He argues the same principle applies to employee communications. “A benefit may be available, but if employees do not understand what it is for, when they should use it or how it could help them, its value will always be limited.”

For Waring, that means making communications simpler, more relevant and more timely, particularly at the moments when people are most likely to need support.

“It also means changing how success is measured,” he explains. “Take-up and app downloads can provide useful indicators, but they do not tell the whole story. Did somebody access support earlier? Was an absence prevented from becoming long term? Did an employee return to work sooner? Did the organisation retain someone it might otherwise have lost?”

Ultimately, Waring’s message to the sector is not that employers necessarily need more benefits. It is that the industry needs to get much better at explaining the value of what is already there.

“If employers understand the problem a benefit is solving, employees understand how and when it can help them and providers can demonstrate the outcome, then workplace benefits become far more than another line on a reward package,” he explains.

“They become part of how organisations keep people healthy, resilient and make work and health sustainable.”