Most employees have mental health benefits they never use, but according to Kerry Brooks, assistant vice president of absence and disability management at Lincoln Financial Group in Radnor, Pennsylvania, the bigger opportunity for benefits brokers isn't redesigning plans, but becoming the communication strategy their clients never knew they needed.
"Access to mental health benefits is increasingly less of a barrier," Brooks said. "The broker's role is shifting toward helping employers design year-round, multichannel awareness campaigns; not limiting communication to open enrollment."
That shift, she argues, opens a substantial new service line for benefits advisors willing to move beyond the plan and into the workforce.
For many employers, especially smaller ones, the reason mental health communication falls flat is bandwidth. Human resources teams are stretched, and benefits messaging gets crowded out by operational priorities the moment open enrollment closes.
Brooks sees this as a structural opening for benefits brokers. Rather than equipping employers with communication templates and hoping for the best, she suggests brokers consider going directly to employee populations themselves, presenting as a trusted, knowledgeable voice on how to navigate mental health resources.
"This opportunity is especially strong for small business employers," Brooks said. "They lack the depth of internal resources that national-sized employers have, making broker-led communication strategy a meaningful differentiator."
The model she describes is repeatable and scalable. A broker builds a core employee presentation around behavioral health navigation (e.g. how to use an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), where multiple programs overlap, what to do first when you don't know where to turn) and delivers it across multiple small-business clients with carrier support. The content stays consistent; the delivery is personalized to each workforce.
A critical piece of making that communication land is demographic segmentation, something the Lincoln/IBI research underscores but that brokers are uniquely positioned to act on.
"Five generations are currently in the workforce, each consuming information differently," Brooks said. "A single communication approach will not reach all employees effectively."
Her guidance is that Gen Z and millennials, as digital natives, are the higher users of digital behavioral health tools and telehealth platforms and respond well to app-based nudges and email. Gen X and baby boomers may respond better to traditional formats such as print materials, postcards, and in-person sessions.
The real value-add, Brooks said, is bringing data into that conversation. Brokers can analyze current benefits utilization against an employer's own workforce demographics including age distribution, job type, and salary band, to identify pockets of underutilization and design targeted information campaigns. That kind of analysis transforms a broker from plan administrator to strategic advisor.
The generational differences affect how mental health is discussed overall. Gen Z has grown up treating behavioral health as a normalized topic, while many older workers entered the workforce in environments where it was rarely acknowledged.
The third pillar of Brooks' framework is manager preparedness; a lever the research identifies as significantly underdeveloped. Among young workers aged 18 to 29, the study found that only 34 percent reported receiving strong supervisor support around mental health.
"Managers are a key lever in creating psychological safety," Brooks said. She recommends they be trained on available benefits and given practical language to raise the topic in team meetings and one-on-ones as a natural check-in.
The early signals managers can learn to notice are often behavioral: a team member who has gone quiet on video calls, withdrawn from collaboration, or whose output has changed.
In those moments, a manager equipped with a simple, non-clinical script that points an employee toward an EAP or behavioral health line, can function as the year-round activation point the benefits plan was always designed for but rarely had.
Brooks' headline message from the Lincoln/IBI research is that one size does not fit all in mental health benefits communication, and the brokers who understand that, and act on it, have a concrete service to offer that most of their clients are not getting anywhere else.
"Leverage utilization data to find where specific employee populations need the most guidance," she said. "That's where the communication strategy should start."
For benefits brokers looking to move beyond the transactional, the mental health awareness gap isn't just a problem to solve for clients. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), employee wellbeing programs including behavioral health communication, rank among the highest-priority benefit investments for US employers heading into 2026. The gap is real, the data exists, and the clients who most need help are the ones with the least capacity to close it on their own.
That is, increasingly, the broker's opportunity.
