Giving employees a say in benefits led Match Group to revamp its mental health offerings

Do employers know whether their mental health offerings actually benefit their workers? It seems many are in the dark.

Nearly all (97%) employers offer mental health services, according to a 2025 survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Yet far fewer actually take steps to know if their programs are working for their employees.

“Employers would benefit from greater visibility into their employee utilization data…[and] from more rigorous accountability systems to ensure their benefits are always meeting the mark,” the report authors wrote.

The 85% of employers that expressed interest in enhancing their mental health benefits might consider looking to Match Group as an example. The parent company of online dating services including Match.com, Tinder, and Hinge retooled its mental health benefits after double-clicking on sentiment that its surveys picked up from its young workers.

Let’s talk. For the last three years, employee respondents to Match Group’s benefits surveys have ranked mental health among their top three priorities, D.V. Williams, the company’s chief people officer, said at HR Brew’s Total Rewards Equation event in September. He said that’s especially true of the company’s Gen Z employees, who want “whole life benefits” that go beyond traditional plans and are inclusive of mental healthcare.

To support its more than 2,000 workers across 20 countries, Williams said the company often needs to dive deeper beyond the survey results to understand what exactly employees want from their benefits. This has created “more of a working relationship with our employees,” Williams said, noting that it has also shifted workers’ understanding of the role they stand to play in benefits, and the way benefits can contribute to their lives holistically.

Through conversations with employees, Williams’s team learned that Match Group’s Gen Z workers wanted a say in how the company’s total rewards budget was invested. “They actually want a part in deciding where that budget goes, where does it actually make sense?” he said.

And they wanted to focus on enhancing mental health support. “The expectation on mental health has grown so much that it rivals that of your traditional health benefits,” Williams said. While mental health benefits are important to other generations, “it’s really doubled down on that population [Gen Z],” he noted.

Benefits revamp. Match Group’s mental health benefit was initially part of its standard group health plan and provided employees with an annual allotment of eight free one-on-one sessions with a therapist or coach, after which they could pay to continue care. When utilization picked up in 2022, Williams said his team realized the company needed a mental health benefits provider with more robust services.

That realization led to a partnership with Modern Health, a virtual mental health benefits platform. However, the partnership was separate from Match Group’s standard health plan, meaning employees who completed their free sessions either had to pay to continue or find a new provider via Modern Health.

“That wasn’t working,” Williams said. So Match Group integrated its healthcare plan with its third-party provider so employees wouldn’t have to make a switch.

“Employees love that because they felt like they were heard,” Williams said. And it didn’t affect Match Group’s benefits budget: Many providers will offer or create solutions for employers at little or no cost, he said, because they find value in learning about the trends affecting their customers’ employees.

“It actually cost us nothing to figure that out, but what it did show was the importance of understanding the agency that our biggest growing [employee] population wants as it relates to their benefits in general,” he said.