Five Generations, One Benefits Budget: How to Design Health Support That Fits

Maya is 24 and working her first job after finishing school. She eats whatever is most convenient between her commute home and a gym class that usually starts around 9 p.m., and she feels fine. “She has never opened the benefits portal because nothing in there looks like it’s for someone who just feels okay and doesn’t have any health conditions,” said Yasmine Meneses, a registered dietitian and the VP of U.S. clinical operations at Nutrium.

Maya is just a hypothetical. Meneses discusses her and four other fictional coworkers. Daniel, 33, is a new father with no time to spare. Priya, 47, just got a high blood sugar result while caring for a parent two states away. Marcus, 58, manages his hypertension well, and Angela, 66, has no plans to retire. Together, they show how a single participation rate can hide the people a well-being program never reaches. Meneses walked through these stories during a From Day One webinar titled, Five Generations, One Benefits Budget: How to Design Health Support That Fits.

What One Participation Rate Hides

Now imagine a company’s well-being program has a 24% participation rate. Meneses says the number alone can’t tell you whether the program works, or for whom. During a live poll conducted during the webinar, 41% of attendees said they receive only aggregate data, and 43% said they receive no engagement data at all.

About 86% of employees say they are confused about their benefits, according to Businessolver's 2025 Benefits Insights Report. In a 2024 Voya survey, 91% of working Americans said they typically choose the same health plan as the year before during open enrollment. “Offering a benefit is not the same as making it accessible, understandable, or useful,” Meneses said.

Employers project an 8.2% rise in health benefit costs per employee for 2027, the biggest jump since 2003, according to preliminary results from Marsh’s 2026 National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans. Without the planned cost cuts, employers expect an 11% increase. “A program you can’t evaluate is a program that you can’t defend and likely won’t be able to keep,” Meneses said. 

Health Needs Shift by Life Stage

Meneses is wary of generational stereotypes. “Age can give us useful context. That’s true, but it doesn’t define anyone’s health needs,” she said. “These are common priorities by stage, not rules by age.”

Early career is a prime window for prevention, but people like Maya have no reason to seek help. If a program only starts at diagnosis, Meneses cautions, “Maya will likely never get in.”

For new parents and caregivers like the Daniel persona, the problem is time. “He knows what to eat. He just doesn’t have the hours to plan, to shop, or to work out which benefit is going to help him,” Meneses said.

Midlife is when cardiometabolic risks start to surface. More than two in five adults in the U.S. have prediabetes, and eight in 10 of them don’t know it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A November 2025 KFF poll found that about 12% of US adults currently take a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drug, and that share climbs to 22% among adults ages 50 to 64. “Nutrition care supports these medications. It doesn’t replace them,” Meneses said. 

Needs vary the most later in a career. Some employees juggle several medications, while others, like Angela, simply want to stay strong. “She doesn’t need a different benefits package. What she needs is to find the right support in the one that she currently has,” Meneses said.

Three Steps to Find the Gaps

Meneses lays out a method that starts with the vendor reporting employers already get.

First, ask for the right cut. Request aggregated engagement data by broad age bands, with privacy protections that hide small groups where someone could be identified.

Measure three things, not one. Track activation rate, engagement rate, and six-month retention rates. Define "active" the same way every time.

And investigate before concluding. Look at communication, relevance, and access, then ask employees directly through short surveys.

Meneses also asks HR leaders to open their own benefits portal the way a sleep-deprived parent would. “If you hesitate, if you have questions, if you’re unsure what to do within that benefits portal, and most people do, you'’e learned something about your dashboard that you would never know otherwise,” she said. 

Match the Fix to the Pattern

“Finding the gap is where most people stop, and honestly, it’s the least useful place to stop,” Meneses said. 

She walked through three common patterns. In the first, low activation and reasonable retention suggest that too few people are getting started. Meneses recommends promoting the benefit during onboarding or a return to work, rather than relying solely on open enrollment. “If every description of the benefit implies a problem, the employees who feel fine will very reasonably decide it’s not for them,” she said.

In the second, reasonable activation but lower retention suggests that people are signing up but dropping off. Before changing the messaging, employers should look for friction, such as too many steps to schedule a first appointment.

The third pattern is healthy numbers but unmet need. Claims data may show a need for the benefit even when the intended group isn't using it. “This is the one that the aggregate reporting hides the best because nothing in it looks wrong,” Meneses said.. She suggests checking whether health plans, pharmacy benefits, and chronic condition programs are referring workers to one another.

“The point of segmenting your data is to find what’s not working, not to find an excuse to cut something that is working,” Meneses said. As employers plan for 2027, Meneses encourages them to change the question they ask. “Don’t just ask how many employees are using a benefit. Ask who you’re reaching, who you might be missing, and what you’re going to do about it next.”

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Nutrium, for sponsoring this webinar. 

Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.

(Photo by SewcreamStudio/iStock)