As we approach the halfway mark of the year, HR and benefits leaders have a critical window to strategically reassess their mental health and overall benefits strategies. Checking in mid-year allows leaders to proactively uncover blind spots in the current benefits and employee engagement with them, rebalance budgets, and improve employee support before the high-pressure final quarter begins.
Even if you’re satisfied with your current vendors-or locked into multi-year contracts-a mid-year check-in is still a valuable opportunity to assess the evolving market, explore emerging solutions to employ down the line, and start voicing key questions to internal stakeholders so your organization stays ahead of the curve.
In this article, we discuss why a mid-year benefits reassessment around mental health matters and guide HR professionals through 6 steps for approaching it with data, employee feedback, and market intelligence.
Why do a mid-year benefits reassessment?
The modern workforce isn’t static, and your mental health benefits strategy shouldn’t be either. Between major life events, workload changes, economic uncertainty, and health developments, employee needs change throughout the year.
A mid-year review helps you:
- Measure the ROI and impact of your current plan before renewal discussions
- Proactively identify underused resources and low engagement with your current benefits
- Course-correct before end-of-year deadlines and fourth-quarter pressure
- Stay competitive in a tight labor market
By catching gaps now, HR leaders can prevent costly downstream issues like rising healthcare claims, burnout, attrition, and disengagement.
Mental health, in particular, is an area where early action pays dividends. According to the World Health Organization, every $1 invested in mental health care yields a $4 return in improved health and productivity. Employers have taken note, especially as healthcare costs in general continue to rise at an increasing rate: Mercer’s report of its Survey on Health and Benefits Strategies for 2025 showed that nearly half of large employers in the U.S. (those with 500 or more employees) have expanded their mental and behavioral health benefits in the last year and plan to continue that trend. Yet, too many organizations wait until open enrollment or annual renewals to reevaluate what could-and should-be working better. Reassessing your offerings now puts you ahead of that curve, demonstrates a level of care and responsiveness to your employees, and sets them up for greater wellbeing and improved job satisfaction.
Step 1: Audit your existing benefits utilization.
Start by conducting a comprehensive audit of your current mental health and wellness benefits. Look at:
- Utilization rates – Are people using what you offer? Which services are being used the most, and which are being used the least?
- Accessibility– Are services and resources available across locations and roles? Can everyone access them easily?
- Employee feedback – What’s working and what’s not? What do they need more or less of?
- Equity and inclusion – Do offerings support a diverse workforce-e.g., employees of varying backgrounds and ethnicities, neurodivergent employees, parents, remote workers, etc.?
- Gaps in proactive support – Do you only offer reactive services, or are there tools for daily wellbeing?
There are several different tools that can help you gather this information. Use your HRIS or benefits admin platform (e.g., Workday, ADP, UKG) to pull utilization reports. Conduct anonymous pulse surveys focused specifically on employees’ mental health and wellbeing using programs like Qualtrics, Culture Amp, or SurveyMonkey. And interview key employee groups or team leads to gather nuanced, on-the-ground insights.
You can-and should-also ask your vendors for detailed reports to ensure they’re being fully transparent about engagement, outcomes, and overall performance. Their willingness and ability to share this data is a key indicator of the quality of their partnership.
? Tip: In all of the collected data, don’t just look at what’s being used. Dig into what’s not being used and why.
Step 2: Reassess your proactive mental health coverage.
Most traditional EAPs are reactive-used in moments of crisis. But proactive care-which helps employees manage stress, emotions, and resilience before issues escalate-is what really allows for major wellbeing improvements, cost savings, and productivity gains.
Look at your current benefits. Do you have the following proactive offerings?
- Daily mindfulness prompts, journaling platforms, and self-regulation tools
- Preventive counseling or therapy sessions
- On-demand webinars and training on a wide range of issues impacting mental health, such as stress, burnout, work-life harmony, inclusion, etc.
- Specialized support for managers, parents, and high-risk roles
- Access to mental health support for employees’ loved ones
- Workplace policies that promote employee wellbeing
Journey Proactive EAP is designed specifically for this. It integrates seamlessly into your existing benefits stack and HRIS systems (including platforms like SAP SuccessFactors and BambooHR) and provides personalized, digital-first support that employees can access whenever they want or need. Journey also allows employees to extend care to family and loved ones of any nature-a key, proactive differentiator among EAP and mental health benefits providers.
Step 3: Run a market scan and competitor benchmark.
In today’s talent market, your mental health offerings are part of your employer brand. The level of proactive support you provide and the culture around wellbeing that you promote influence how attractive your company is to current and prospective employees. To stay competitive, HR leaders need to know how their offerings stack up against others in the industry:
- What mental health tools or platforms are your peers offering?
- Are they integrating coaching, digital therapy, or AI-driven tools?
- Do they subsidize any of the benefits, including therapy and wellness classes, or offer flexible mental health days?
- What kind of policies and practices do your competitors have regarding time off, remote-work boundaries, and flexible scheduling?
There are a few particularly helpful resources here: the annual Employer Health Care Strategy Survey from the Business Group on Health, the Society for Human Resource Management’s Toolkit for Creating a Mental Health–Friendly Workplace, and open data from industry peer groups or benefit brokers.
If your competitors are offering robust mental health stipends, for example, or integrating proactive platforms like ours, and you’re not, you may be at a disadvantage in attracting and retaining top talent.
Step 4: Tie mental health offerings to business metrics.
To make a compelling case for change internally, HR teams need to link mental health strategy to business outcomes. That means tying benefits to:
- Healthcare costs – Have claims increased or decreased with your current benefits strategy? Are high-cost claims linked to unmanaged stress or mental health issues?
- Absenteeism – Have employees taken more or fewer sick days and mental health days compared to previous years?
- Turnover and retention – What percentage of exit surveys cite burnout or work-life imbalance?
- Engagement scores – Do those with access to mental health tools report higher satisfaction or productivity?
- Productivity – Has employee productivity increased or decreased with your current benefits plan? Do employees feel more creative and focused when the company actively promotes and supports mental health?
Implementing an effective proactive mental health benefits strategy tends to lead to tangible gains for companies and improved engagement among employees. Journey’s clients have seen a 10x increase in EAP engagement, on average, when implementing our Proactive EAP and strategy-an increase that pays dividends. A 2022 study conducted by inZights Consulting showed that employers using Journey saved, on average, $580 per engaged employee per year in healthcare costs and $216 per employee per year in productivity and absenteeism loss savings. This echoed the results of a clinical study conducted by Humana, which found a 51% reduction in absenteeism in organizations using the Journey Proactive EAP. Pair that with reduced healthcare costs and a $232 savings in reduced employee turnover, and you get a total savings of over $1,000 per employee per year.
Use the data you collect about your organization to create a business case for investing more in mental health benefits.
Step 5: Talk to your vendors-or find new ones.
Coupled with the data you’ve collected, use the findings of your benefits audit and market scan to evaluate whether your current vendors are meeting your needs.
- Do they offer adequate proactive care or only reactive services and crisis response?
- Can they integrate with your systems seamlessly?
- Do they meet the diverse needs of your workforce?
- Do they help facilitate engagement among employees?
- Do they provide clear data on engagement and outcomes?
- Do they offer tailored solutions for your industry and specific roles within it?
Vendors like Journey provide full transparency around utilization, access, and effectiveness, and work directly with HR teams to tailor engagement strategies and content to fit exactly what their employees need. If your vendor doesn’t check these boxes, it may be time to shop around.
If you work with a consultant or broker when finding vendors, bring your consultants into the conversation. Share the list of questions above with them, and ask how your current or potential vendors stack up, especially when it comes to proactive care, engagement, and outcomes. Make sure the consultants are aware of what vendors like Journey offer, and let them know your intention to set your organization up with partners who not only support your mental health benefits strategy but also help you elevate it.
Step 6: Communicate and re-engage your workforce.
Once you’ve reassessed and possibly refreshed your benefits strategy, don’t forget the rollout. Re-engagement is just as important as reassessment. Thankfully, you don’t have to go it alone. With all of our clients, Journey takes full ownership of engagement, giving each one a dedicated Customer Success Manager who conducts an in-depth discovery process to identify current engagement gaps, opportunities, and organizational nuances. From there, we design tailored engagement strategies that go beyond.
For example, with Alorica, a global leader in customer experience solutions with employees spread across 20 countries, Journey created 20 unique, culturally relevant rollout and engagement strategies to reach employees in each country. And with Walgreens, we co-created a high-impact campaign to break the Guinness World Record for the largest group meditation. Strategies like these help break through accessibility barriers and stigma so employees know what resources are available to them and feel comfortable engaging.
If, however, your team is implementing an engagement strategy on your own, use these tactics to help:
- Relaunch EAPs or mental health tools in all-hands meetings and reinforce the offerings in a multi-channel communications campaign
- Partner with employee resource groups to host mental health awareness sessions
- Send out quarterly benefit updates or “how-to” guides
- Celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month (May) or World Mental Health Day (October)
- Update your mental health–supportive policies and encourage your teams to utilize them
Tie it all together by creating a mid-year “Wellbeing Roadmap” document or webpage that outlines everything available to employees, categorized by need (e.g., stress, caregiving, sleep, burnout). Giving your employees multiple avenues to learn and be reminded about the mental health benefits available to them helps improve awareness and boost engagement for the long haul.
Empowering HR to Lead the Mental Health Conversation
Gone are the days when HR was simply the administrator of medical benefits. Today’s most impactful HR leaders act as strategic advisors, guiding organizations in decisions that affect the whole person and the bottom line. By reassessing your mental health strategy mid-year, you’re not just helping employees; you’re also helping your organization stay resilient, cost-effective, and future-ready.
Mental health can’t wait until open enrollment. The time to act is now-before burnout spikes, before Q4 pressure sets in, before another opportunity to improve employee wellbeing passes. With the right tools, the right partners, and a clear-eyed reassessment, HR leaders can shape a benefits strategy that delivers real results: for people and for the business.If you’d like to learn more about how Journey can integrate into your existing system and support proactive mental health care across your workforce, connect with us here.
