Zurich has published a client-facing piece on overlooked workplace protections that is more useful to benefits brokers than it first appears - not because it contains new research, but because it arrives at the right moment and frames the coverage problem in terms clients actually recognise.
The piece cites a 2024 LIMRA survey of roughly 4,000 US employees in which only 56% said they understood their life insurance and just 47% understood their disability cover. Harriet Taylor, Zurich's head of global employee benefits, said that gap in understanding means employees routinely overlook the protections they already have - and by extension never identify the gaps where they do not.
The three specific gaps Zurich identifies are worth putting directly in front of HR contacts ahead of enrollment: Income protection that replaces only part of earnings and is capped at a level higher earners outgrow quickly. Life cover tied to employment that disappears the moment someone leaves the job. And post-retirement long-term care needs that employer-sponsored support typically does not cover adequately.
The Zurich piece does its most useful work in explaining the voluntary top-up mechanic - a layer many employees never engage with because no one signs them up and the window to act closes with enrollment. Employer baseline life cover is typically one or two times salary.
A voluntary top-up lets an employee increase that figure, often without individual medical underwriting and at group rates that are materially better than comparable retail products. The same applies to income protection, critical illness and accident cover.
Zurich flags that top-ups make the most sense when major financial obligations arrive - children, a mortgage, becoming the primary earner. That is the exact conversation a benefits broker should be having with any client whose workforce skews toward employees in their 30s and 40s.
The piece also raises the sandwich generation framing directly: employees simultaneously supporting children and ageing parents carry a more complex protection need than a standard employer-sponsored package was designed to meet. That cohort, which sits squarely in the core working-age demographic of most employer client books, is also the one most likely to be underinsured relative to their actual obligations.
One section of the Zurich piece is worth lifting into client conversations explicitly. Taylor says the goal is not only helping employees understand what responds after something goes wrong - it is helping them avoid getting there. Filippo Mazzei, Zurich's head of proposition management for corporate life and pensions, frames it as resilience in three dimensions: financial, physical and mental. In practice that means access to savings planning, mental health coaching and digital physiotherapy before a claim exists - services increasingly embedded in group benefits packages but rarely communicated clearly to employees.
For brokers, that framing reframes the benefits review from a coverage adequacy check into a workforce wellbeing conversation - a more defensible and more differentiated position than simply presenting renewal terms.
Most calendar-year plans open enrollment in October or November for January 1 effective dates. Forwarding Zurich's piece to HR contacts now, framed as something to share with employees before the enrollment window opens, positions the broker ahead of the wave rather than scrambling once it has started. The same material sent after enrollment is underway arrives too late to shape decisions.
