Webinar: Your workforce is changing. Are your benefits keeping up?

Key takeaways:

• Most benefits teams are focused on solving problems that have already happened
• Predictive thinking is becoming an important part of modern benefits leadership
• Evaluating signals across multiple data points can reveal emerging workforce needs before they become visible
• Life stages are becoming a more useful way to understand employee needs than traditional generational categories

Gethin Nadin, Chief Advisory Officer at Benifex, recently hosted a webinar titled Your workforce is changing. Are your benefits keeping up? to discuss evolving workforce needs and how organizations can embrace a more predictive approach to benefits in order to more effectively meet those needs.

This article is based on that webinar. If you’d prefer to listen to the full insights and discussion, you can also catch the full webinar on demand here.

People’s lives don’t stand still.

One employee might be planning for retirement while helping ageing parents. Another is raising a young family while managing rising living costs. And someone else is navigating a health condition while building their career. Every day, people move through moments that shape what they need from work and from their benefits.

At the same time, the world around them is changing. Technology is transforming how people work and what they expect from the organizations that support them.

But many benefits strategies are still built around what employees needed yesterday, rather than trying to predict what they’ll need tomorrow.

The organizations that support people most effectively in the years ahead won’t simply respond to changing needs. They’ll actually understand those needs earlier and act on them sooner.

In our webinar Your workforce is changing, Gethin Nadin explores how organizations can become more progressive in the way they think about benefits strategy. Rather than asking how organizations can react faster, the conversation focuses on a more important question:

How can benefits leaders anticipate employee needs before they become employee challenges?

It’s a subtle shift in thinking, but an important one.

Most benefits strategies are designed to answer the question: what do employees need today?

The webinar explores a different question altogether: what are employees likely to need next?

And that distinction could shape the future of employee benefits.

Stop solving yesterday’s problems

Most benefits leaders have access to more workforce data than ever before.

Whether that’s claims data, utilization reports, annual surveys, or enrollment trends — HR teams often sit on large amounts of information that contain valuable insight.

And those insights matter. They help organizations understand what’s happening across their workforce. But they all have one thing in common: they tell you about something that’s already happened.

Many benefits strategies are designed to respond to signals that arrive after the fact. And as workforce needs become more complex and change more quickly, that approach can become increasingly difficult to maintain at scale.

Some employers take a more proactive approach to other areas of their business (pretty successfully, too).

In the webinar, Gethin shared that Amazon generates around 35% of sales through recommendations. Rather than waiting for customers to search for what they need, Amazon uses behavioral signals to predict what customers are likely to need next.

What if organizations could identify emerging employee needs in the same way? Predictively rather than reactively?

What if benefits data could help reveal challenges before they affect engagement, wellbeing, or productivity?

The future of benefits is about becoming more aware of what your employees need before these unaddressed gaps show up as problems.

Connect the signals hiding in plain sight

Because many organizations are already sitting on valuable insight and data about the future of their workforce, the challenge isn’t necessarily collecting more information, but instead about connecting the information you already have, including:

• Employee sentiment surveys
• Wellbeing data
• Benefits engagement data
• Absence trends
• Workforce demographics
• Claims information

Now viewed separately, these signals can seem small or insignificant. A small increase in absence rates might not seem like much. A slight downward shift in employee sentiment might not spark immediate concern. A modest rise in healthcare claims could easily be overlooked.

Viewed together, though, they often tell a much richer story.

In the webinar, Gethin explores an example where claims data, absence data, and employee sentiment data were combined to identify a growing mental health trend among younger employees in Latin America. No single dataset revealed a clear concern on its own. But together, they highlighted a pattern that deserved attention before it became a larger workforce issue.

It’s situations like these where AI is beginning to play an important role, not because it replaces human judgement, and not because it makes decisions on behalf of benefits leaders. But instead because AI can help organizations spot connections that would otherwise be difficult to see.

The organizations embracing progressive benefits strategies need to become skilled at recognizing what their data is telling them. They need to become better at connecting signals, recognizing patterns, and understanding what those patterns might mean for their workforce in the months and years ahead.

Understand life stages, not just generations

For years, benefits strategies have often been shaped by generational labels: Gen Z. Millennials, Gen X, and so on.

And these categories can be a good starting point, but they often only tell part of the story.

As Gethin discusses in the webinar, life stages are often a much stronger predictor of employee needs than age or generation alone.

Someone buying their first home at 45 may have more in common with someone buying their first home at 25 than they do with others in their own generation.

The same can be true for new parents, carers, or employees preparing for retirement. The common factor isn’t necessarily always age, but rather circumstance.

People experience life through moments, responsibilities, and transitions. Those experiences often shape benefit needs far more than age alone.

These varying needs tend to be defined by what’s happening in a person’s life, and as traditional life paths become less predictable, employers need a more flexible way to understand changing employee needs.

Benefits leaders may need to rethink some of the ways they segment and understand their workforce in order to continue to meet people with the right support at the right time in their lives.

Prepare for workforce shifts that are already taking shape

Some workforce changes are happening gradually, while others are arriving faster than many organizations expect.

One of the clearest examples is demographic change: by 2031, one in five Americans will be aged 65 or older. That same source shows that by 2035, adults over 65 are expected to outnumber children in the United States.

These numbers matter because they point to a workforce that will look very different from the one which many benefits strategies were originally designed to support.

As workforces age, organizations are likely to see growing demand for:

• Healthcare support
• Retirement readiness programmes
• Financial planning
• Chronic condition support
• Caregiving resources

Many employees are already balancing the needs of children and ageing parents at the same time. Others are extending their careers beyond traditional retirement ages. These experiences influence wellbeing, financial security, and day-to-day life.

Gethin argues that these trends should not be viewed as future challenges, but that they’re current realities:

“What’s really interesting is if you think about a developer or an engineer working in your organization that would typically retire at maybe 62 but is now working to 72, what do those extra 10 years do to your organization?”

He also points out:

“[People’s] dementia risk doubles pretty much every five years over the age of 65. So if people are working longer and staying in the workforce longer, that’s going to start to become a health and well-being issue in the workforce, which historically has never been for previous generations because people retired typically earlier.”

It’s exactly this type of workforce shift that makes predictive thinking so important. Organizations can’t afford to wait until challenges emerge at scale before they start planning for them.

The question for employers is whether organizations are prepared to recognize these types of changes early enough to respond effectively.

Start spotting needs before they surface

The organizations embracing proactive benefits strategies aren’t waiting for workforce needs to become workforce problems.

They’re looking at data related to changing demographics, employee behavior, health trends, and broader shifts in society. They’re asking what today’s signals might reveal about tomorrow’s needs.

During the webinar, Gethin references an example of Target identifying purchasing patterns that could predict pregnancy, so that they could then suggest products through targeted marketing efforts in line with this buying behavior.

And the lesson in this example isn’t about retail, but rather about recognising that future needs often leave clues long before those needs become obvious.

The same principle can apply to benefits offerings, too: signals about future wellbeing, financial, or caregiving needs often exist before employees actively seek support, and can be identified through data signals such as absence trends, employee sentiment, and more.

And organizations can look beyond the workplace for these clues, too.

People develop expectations everywhere they go in life: from the healthcare services they use to the financial products they interact with daily; all of these interactions have an impact on their expectations as consumers.

The webinar highlights several examples of this shift, including financial wellbeing, healthcare access, and growing interest in new treatments such as GLP-1 medications. Long before these topics become common workplace conversations, they often emerge elsewhere in people’s lives.

These changing expectations outside of work create an important opportunity for benefits leaders. Staying on top of consumer, societal, and workforce data trends together can help to effectively anticipate the needs of your people not just in relation to their workplace needs, but also to those outside of work:

Looking at “what’s happening in society, how people are spending their money, what people’s preferences for different things might be, will start to give us a good example of […] what are people going to want from the workforce [in the next 5 years] and what they’re going to want from their benefit schemes.”

The organizations best prepared for future employee needs won’t only monitor what competitors are doing, they’ll also be paying attention to the world their employees live in every day.

Build benefits around what people will need next

The workforce is changing, and the pace of that change is increasing.

Not through a single trend or a single generation, but through millions of individual lives, each shaped by different experiences, responsibilities, and ambitions.

The organizations that support people most effectively in the years ahead won’t rely solely on annual surveys, utilisation reports, or historic trends. They’ll combine those insights with a deeper understanding of workforce shifts, life stages, and emerging employee needs outside of work.

In doing so, benefits can become a strategic way to help people navigate life’s important moments with greater confidence, clarity, and support.

That’s the real promise of a more predictive approach to benefits. Better support for real people, when they need it most.

Watch the webinar on demand

Prefer to listen to the discussion? Watch Your workforce is changing. Are your benefits keeping up? on demand to discover how organizations are preparing to support the workforce of tomorrow.