When Open Enrollment rolls around, employees find themselves buried under an avalanche of medical options, leaving little mental bandwidth for anything else. According to Robert Deshaies, Chief Operating Officer at WEX, treating benefits as a once-a-year administrative task means leaving substantial value on the table for both your organization and employees.
“Benefits utilization is a continuous, 365-day strategic priority, not a once-a-year administrative task,” says Deshaies, adding that recent research highlights a glaring gap in traditional benefits strategies. “Twenty-one percent of HR executives report that insufficient guidance during Open Enrollment serves as the main barrier to benefits utilization, while 26% point to a complete lack of ongoing education outside of enrollment season as the biggest obstacle holding employees back.”
When communications are crammed into a brief window, high-value programs like financial wellness support, student loan repayment assistance, lifestyle spending accounts (LSAs), and long-term savings vehicles like HSAs and HRAs frequently get sidelined.
“Distributing these touchpoints across the entire calendar year meets people where they are, when they have the bandwidth to absorb the information,” Deshaies explains. “It relieves the pressure on that narrow enrollment window and transforms a complex, high-stress scramble into a clear, continuous dialogue that drives real utilization, financial health, and long-term organizational loyalty.”
In our latest Faces, meet Robert Deshaies.
How can working in benefits showcase how executives really care about their people, and how you want your employees to feel safe and comfortable?
Genuine care for your workforce starts when leadership stops viewing benefits as an administrative expense and starts treating them as a direct strategic investment in their most valuable asset – their people.
Building a resilient, high-performing team requires a holistic view of wellness that encompasses financial, mental, and physical health. Today’s workforce evaluates employer empathy and job security through the lens of healthcare access. Look at the latest research from Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI): 74% of health plan enrollees rate prescription drug coverage as “very important” when evaluating an employer. That demand is being turbocharged by therapies like GLP-1s, with over two-thirds of privately insured adults expecting metabolic health coverage as a standard part of their health plan.
At the same time, as you look at younger generations entering and scaling in the workforce, their expectations extend far beyond traditional health coverage. Younger employees are looking to employers for a much broader set of modernized, flexible benefits – from lifestyle spending accounts (LSAs) and student loan or tuition assistance to housing support and financial wellness tools. Employees view benefits as a primary decision point when choosing where to work and where to stay, evaluating employers on how dynamically they evolve their offerings for today’s and tomorrow’s needs.
Across every generation, affordability remains a massive hurdle for millions of workers. When 40% of enrollees are hit with rising healthcare costs, the downstream financial strain forces them to make painful compromises – cutting back on daily necessities or draining their retirement savings. Real executive leadership means solving this equation for your workforce.
The solution lies in smart, modern infrastructure that makes benefits both seamless and sustainable. By pairing alternative financial models — like defined-contribution HRAs — with wrap-around clinical care, employers can establish predictable, capped funding parameters for high-demand therapies while fully protecting their company’s long-term budget.
When you strip away the crushing stress of out-of-pocket medical costs, you create true psychological safety. You give your people the breathing room to focus on what matters: their health and their families and delivering great work.
How can company leaders make HR a value within their organization?
Company leaders elevate HR from an operational function to a core value driver when they align benefits strategy directly with enterprise business outcomes.
At WEX, we operate at a massive scale, powering more than 20% of all HSAs nationwide and serving roughly 60% of the Fortune 1000. Our technology is uniquely positioned and built with the flexibility to help employers easily deliver on a broad range of valued benefits – whether that is navigating complex health accounts or managing modern lifestyle and education programs.
That vantage point gives us a front-row seat to a persistent industry challenge: millions of employees have access to powerful, tax-advantaged tools, yet they fail to maximize them due to unnecessary friction and fragmented communication.
To drive real financial impact, HR leaders must relentlessly eliminate the gap between what employees need and what they understand. Complex insurance jargon, confusing contribution rules, and vague expense lists create friction. That friction breeds overwhelm, causing employees to default to old habits or abandon their care entirely.
By stripping away friction, driving transparent communication, and backing it up with flexible technology and financial models, HR transitions from a cost center to a talent magnet. That is how you cultivate a high-performing culture where top talent wants to join, deliver results, and stay for the long haul.
How can HR and benefits leaders properly measure the impact of benefits programs?
Measuring real impact requires looking far beyond basic enrollment numbers. Executive leaders need to evaluate benefits through three critical lenses: financial outcomes, talent performance, and operational efficiency.
First, evaluate behavioral shifts and wealth-building. Are your employees using tax-advantaged accounts solely as transactional pass-throughs for immediate bills, or are they leveraging them to build long-term financial security? Tracking metrics like average HSA balance growth, custodial asset growth, and the percentage of account holders investing their funds reveals whether your financial wellness tools are driving true stability.
Second, map benefits directly to workforce productivity and talent strategy. Monitor how targeted health solutions correlate with retention in key, high-demand roles, alongside reductions in health-related absenteeism. When employees feel supported in their physical and mental health, you see it reflected directly in engagement and retention.
True impact is not measured by the number of benefits you offer. It is measured by the tangible health, financial resilience, and organizational performance those benefits deliver to your bottom line.
Where do you see the industry heading in five years? Or are you seeing any current trends?
The traditional health benefits model built in the 1990s is at a breaking point. Employers cannot continue to absorb unpredictable renewal spikes and opaque pricing structures. We are experiencing a fundamental shift that closely mirrors the retirement revolution, when corporate America transitioned away from legacy pensions to embrace the clarity and predictability of the 401(k). Today, forward-thinking organizations are bringing that exact same financial discipline to healthcare.
Rather than signing off on uncapped cost increases for core health plans, companies are adopting modern, defined-contribution frameworks. Over the next five years, high-performing organizations will step away from rigid, one-size-fits-all coverage. Employees are demanding that employers evolve their benefit offerings for todays and tomorrow’s needs – spanning healthcare, financial wellness, and lifestyle support.
The future belongs to flexible, tech-driven platforms that give employers fixed budget control while empowering employees to tailor their benefits to their specific stage of life. That is how we align business fiscal health with true employee well-being.