I wonder sometimes if we should create a "Maslow Benefits AI Agent" to help us with our comms. I mean, we keep hearing more and more about "personalization" and "relevance" and "decision support," but how well are we actually calibrating to those?

It's natural to think we might just need a bigger megaphone. I say we need better registers.

Humans can't hear a dog whistle. Can our employees actually hear what we're, er, shouting at them? I suggest that people living at subsistence level simply cannot hear a message transmitted at the frequency of "self-actualization." And probably not "esteem." And perhaps not even "belonging."

You remember Maslow. The triangle from Psych 101 — physiological needs at the bottom, then safety, then belonging, esteem, and self-actualization perched up top like the cherry on a sundae. Most folks file it away as a tidy little classroom diagram and move on. Maybe we need to tape the graphic to our monitors (at least figuratively, if not literally), because it may be a core factor in one of the most expensive mysteries in our whole industry: Why won't people engage?

The pitch? or the PITCH?
Personalization means, at the very least, we don't pitch a financial wellness program to employees living at the bottom of the pyramid. I mean — would you care about 401(k) matching if you're behind on rent, the car payment's overdue, and the premium's coming out of a check that already doesn't stretch to Friday? Of course you wouldn't. You'd nod politely at the lunch-and-learn and think about how you're going to make the math work this month. That's not actually disengagement. It's simpler: triage.

We've spent two decades — and a Brink's truck-worth of money — assuming that low engagement has been a messaging problem. While that may be some of it, I think it's more that we've been pitching people using a frequency they can't tune in to.

Who's living where?
There's the rub - it's nigh-on impossible really to know what level somebody's living at. But I bet most employees aren't wringing their hands over what it will mean now that SpaceX stock has landed in their Index Funds.

I know some very intelligent people who are of modest means. And I know some very wealthy people who are bat-***t crazy. This is not about whether someone understands a message; it's about whether it's relevant.

Up top, "be your best self" and "achieve more" sing beautifully — to the folks already standing up there. "You're not alone" gets half-heard at the belonging level, which is, not coincidentally, where most of our community-and-support strategy is aimed. But drop down to safety, where job security and basic coverage are the whole concern, and "manage your health" turns into static. And at the very bottom — rent, food, the next paycheck — our cheerful "great news about your 401(k) match!" is flat-out inaudible. Not rejected. Inaudible. That's the difference, and it's everything.

Ladders don't position themselves
Acknowledged: no hierarchy is perfect, nor are hierarchies the only organizing format for human relationships and business presence. People reach for meaning and connection while they're materially scared half to death — they always have. The levels aren't a locked gate you pass through one at a time; I'm not saying this message will only be heard by that level. But when a person's basic security is acutely unmet, it eats their attention. It becomes the ambient background life noise that never abates.

Every call-to-action must pass through another foundational hierarchy:

• Attention

• Interest

• Desire

WIthout somebody deciding they want to, no CTA "clicks through."

No Attention? No interest, no desire, no action. ATTENTION! is the one resource our engagement strategies are barely aware they're competing for. You can have the best wellness platform ever built, and it will lose — every time — to the question of whether the lights stay on.

Who's home?
So where does that leave us? Not wringing our hands, I hope. It leaves us with a better question than "how do we get them to engage?" It leaves us with: what level are we actually talking to, and is anybody home there? Two people with identical demographics — same age, same zip code, same paycheck — can be standing on entirely different rungs, listening for entirely different things. Reading that correctly isn't a nicety. It's the whole ballgame.

The last word
Maybe the most aspirational thing our industry could do isn't to engineer one more clever nudge. And we probably can't actually build a Maslow Benefits AI Agent. So maybe we focus on shoring up the floor — to meet the safety needs first, and earn the right to talk about flourishing later. That's a benefits offer worth reaching for. The pyramid's been trying to tell us this the whole time.

We've just been using a megaphone instead of a tuning fork.

~ Mark Head
© 2026. All Rights Reserved.

Aspirations
“The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people’s highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.”

~ Abraham Maslow

Set a 15-minute call

Set a 30-minute call