Employee Benefits Panel: Insights and Strategies for 2025 (AMA Format)
Susie Goodwin (Level), Sims Tillerson (Blue Raven Actuarial), and Tony Garavaglia (Alliant Insurance Services) · Benefits Panel
Summary
- Benefits programs designed around what is easy to administer leave gaps where employees need help most. Financial stress, caregiving, grief, and life disruptions are the events that drive turnover, and most standard packages do not address them.
- Lifestyle spending accounts and flexible leave buckets are gaining traction because they put control in the hands of employees. Employees who can allocate benefits toward what they actually value use them at higher rates.
- Benefits communication is a year-round responsibility. A policy that exists but is not understood when needed is effectively unavailable.
- Managers are a delivery mechanism for benefits. Training them to show up well during life events, and at return from leave, determines whether a strong program reaches employees at all.
Who This Episode Is For
HR leaders, benefits administrators, and executives evaluating what their benefits program should look like in 2025. Covers financial wellness, LSAs, flexible leave, remote work support, and the communication strategies that drive actual utilization.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- What benefits design looks like when it starts with employee needs rather than administrative convenience, including which offerings are gaining the most traction in 2025.
- How to build leave policies and communication strategies that reach employees when they need support, not just during open enrollment.
Key Takeaways
What Employees Actually Need That Most Benefits Packages Still Miss
Susie Goodwin, Sims Tillerson, and Tony Garavaglia brought nearly five decades of combined benefits experience to this AMA. Their shared observation: companies are increasingly asking why employees use so little of what they are offered. The answer is usually not the benefits themselves. It is the design, the communication, and the delivery.
- Employees do not leave because of bad benefits. They leave because the benefits they have do not address the things disrupting their lives. Financial stress, caregiving obligations, grief, and health crises all go unmet by standard packages.
- The gap between what companies offer and what employees need tends to be widest at the moments that matter most. Open enrollment is too far from the crisis to be useful.
- Designing for the employee means starting with what they are actually navigating, not what is cheapest to administer. The panelists consistently returned to employee experience as the design standard that changes utilization.
Financial Wellness and Lifestyle Spending Accounts as Retention Tools
Financial stress is not a personal problem that stays home when employees come to work. It consumes cognitive and emotional resources that cannot be redirected. Programs that reduce that background load, through debt management tools, retirement advising, or financial coaching, address one of the biggest drags on productivity and engagement.
- Financial wellness benefits see high utilization when they are accessible and clearly communicated. Retirement planning and debt management are the two areas employees most consistently say they want help with.
- Lifestyle spending accounts allow employees to direct benefit dollars toward what they actually value. Broad LSA categories with meaningful funding produce better engagement than narrow ones with low caps.
- Flexible time off with structured minimums reduces the guilt employees feel about using leave. Unlimited PTO without mandatory minimums is often used less than fixed policies because employees are unsure what is acceptable.
Leave Design That Reflects the Full Range of Life Events
Standard leave structures separate bereavement, caregiving, and personal time into distinct buckets with different rules and different approval processes. That structure puts the burden of proof on employees during the moments when they have the least capacity to navigate it.
- Empathy leave buckets consolidate coverage into a single flexible category. An employee facing a family terminal diagnosis should not have to determine which bucket applies before taking time off.
- Leave policies that address both celebratory and difficult life events signal consistency. The same care that applies to a serious illness should apply to a pregnancy loss or a family addiction crisis.
- What happens when an employee returns from leave is as important as the leave itself. The reentry experience often determines whether the company's stated culture matches the reality employees felt when they were most vulnerable.
Supporting Remote and Hybrid Employees Beyond the Home Office Stipend
Remote and hybrid work has changed what employees need from their benefits programs. The challenges are not just logistical. They include reduced social connection and harder work-life boundaries. Support resources that would be visible in an office are harder to find remotely.
- Social connection funds give remote employees something to work with when team cohesion is their responsibility. Teams that have a budget for intentional connection use it and report stronger belonging.
- Work-from-home stipends address the real cost shift that happened when employees became responsible for their own office infrastructure. Commuter benefits for hybrid employees recognize that partial commuting is still a significant expense.
- Managers of remote teams carry more of the benefits delivery responsibility than those in shared offices. Training them to initiate conversations and recognize early signs of disengagement matters more in a distributed environment.
Benefits Communication as a Year-Round Retention Strategy
The panelists were consistent on this point: benefits communication during open enrollment reaches employees in the abstract. Communication at the moment of a life event reaches them when the decision is real. Companies that communicate only once a year are operating a program that is functionally invisible for most of it.
- Short-form video content matches how employees absorb information today. A two-minute walkthrough of a specific benefit outperforms a twelve-page guide every time.
- Data-driven communication means combining what employees say they value with what engagement data shows they actually use. The gap between stated preference and behavior tells you where the communication or the product needs work.
- Managers who know how to approach employees during hard seasons are the last mile of any benefits program. Scripts, tools, and training ensure that what the company built actually reaches the employee who needs it.
About the Panelists
Frequently Asked Questions
What are lifestyle spending accounts and why are companies adopting them?
Lifestyle spending accounts are employer-funded accounts employees use for benefits they actually value, from fitness to mental health to pet care. They improve utilization by putting choice with the employee. Companies are adopting them because a benefits program employees use is worth more than one they ignore.
How should companies communicate benefits outside of open enrollment?
Short-form, engaging content distributed year-round outperforms annual benefit guides. Personalized outreach and event-triggered reminders reach employees when they actually need the information. The goal is to be present at the moment of a life event, not just at the moment of a benefits decision.
What is an empathy leave bucket and how does it work in practice?
An empathy leave bucket is a single flexible leave category for any significant life event, rather than separate buckets for bereavement, caregiving, or personal crisis. It removes the burden of proving which category a loss falls into. Policies designed this way produce more consistent manager behavior and fewer gaps in coverage.
Why does financial stress affect employee performance and benefits utilization?
Financial stress consumes cognitive and emotional resources employees cannot redirect to work. Programs that address debt, retirement uncertainty, or caregiving costs reduce that background load and make other benefits more accessible. Financial wellness is not a perk. It is infrastructure for the rest of the benefits program to work.
What should managers know when an employee returns from leave?
Return from leave is one of the highest-risk moments for retention. A manager who prepares the team, adjusts workloads, and reaches out before the first day back changes how the return feels. How the first few weeks go shapes whether the employee stays.
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