When Ryan Seman sat down for his second therapy session, it wasn’t because he was in crisis, but rather because he wanted to know if the mental health benefit he had just rolled out to thousands of employees at Starkey actually worked.

“I just completed my second session just to see what the experience is like,” he said during a panel at From Day One’s Minneapolis conference. “I have to tell you, it’s light years ahead of the traditional EAP programs that maybe we started our careers with.”

That willingness to test-drive his own well-being initiative, and to talk about it openly, captured the spirit of a wide-ranging panel discussion titled “Holistic and Inclusive Well-Being Strategies for a Multigenerational Workforce.” 

The session brought together leaders from total rewards, generalist HR, health innovation, and hearing technology. Moderated by Megan Thompson, special correspondent for PBS News, the conversation moved beyond benefits checklists. It explored how listening, trust, and a fundamental rethinking of health benefits can reshape employee experience.

Listening Before Launching

Organizations need to understand what their employees actually need for any benefit program to succeed. For Ashley Halvorson, the VP of HR at Thomson Reuters, that starts with a “stacked listening strategies” approach.

“We do use the traditional organizational health index survey,” she said, noting that 79% of the company’s 27,000 employees take the survey each year. “But that’s one time a year, right? So we also do a pulse survey pretty much weekly with a very small portion of our employees to just kind of track along with what their needs are as well.”

Halvorson also encourages informal touchpoints. “As much as we can get people together in person, whenever we have a leader visit a site, we’ll do a coffee chat, or we call it office hours, and kind of open it up just to whatever people need. Sometimes benefits come up, sometimes not, but usually you can hear a little bit more about what’s stressing them,” she added.

Joshua Lemon, the global senior director and head of total rewards at Resideo, takes listening a step further with data. “We actually specifically tried to hone in on the trade-offs that they wanted to make, specifically around their benefits. We did a conjoint study to try to end up digging another layer deeper,” he said. 

Resideo also created a Total Rewards Insight Team, gathering select managers across the business to relay what they hear from employees, an approach that sometimes highlights needs traditional surveys might miss.

Breaking the Stigma

Seman, the VP of health and well-being at Starkey, immediately identified a glaring gap when he joined the hearing-aid manufacturer two years ago. “A clearly significant void we had was a mental well-being solution,” he said. “We had a limited service in the U.S. and nothing outside the U.S.” 

Starkey settled on a global provider after a year-long Request for Proposal (RFP) process. The target engagement rate was 10% in the first year. “We hit that after three months,” Seman said.

The success hinged on confronting stigma head-on. “I don’t want my employer to know I went to the EAP; they’re going to know I went, they’re going to wonder why I went, and I don’t want that cloud hanging over me,” Seman added, articulating the unspoken fear many employees share. Starkey’s solution offers both virtual and in-person options.

Halvorson emphasized the power of peer influence in driving the adoption of well-being benefits. “One of the things that we found to be really successful is to find those influential people within the business, maybe not even at the leadership level, to try out some of these programs and be able to talk about it themselves from personal experience.” 

Starkey took that advice literally: ambassadors wear branded shirts with QR codes on the back that link directly to the mental health app. “People are more willing to engage or pick up the phone because they’ve seen proof of concept,” Seman said.

A New Paradigm for Health

Dr. William Ferro, founder and CEO of Betr Health, brought a provocative diagnosis to the panel. “The CFO is putting a lot of pressure on benefits now to say, 'hey, these costs are growing so high, and essentially, what are we getting for it?'” he said. “HR is saying to the benefits, 'my people are exhausted mentally and physically, none of this stuff seems to be really moving the needle, so there’s a pressure cooker happening.'”

For Dr. Ferro, the deeper problem isn’t just which benefits companies offer, it’s the belief system behind them. “If the belief system is that people lack willpower, lack motivation, it’s their age, it’s their genetics, then you’re going to come up with a program and a paradigm that’s going to lead them down the wrong road,” he pointed out. “We’re blaming and shaming people all the time that they’re having issues with their weight, their sleep, their mood, they’re constantly being put on medication after medication. So one day we can retire, they give us the watch, and now we become a professional patient for the rest of our lives.”

Ferro advocates a gut-first, food-as-medicine approach through Betr Health, emphasizing that many well-being solutions are “built on the wrong paradigm.” He pointed to stark workforce data: “95% of the people come in with low energy, 78% come up with back pain, neck pain, and joint pain. 65% have sleep issues, digestive issues. So this is your workforce coming in every day.” His recommendation is deceptively simple: “We need to make sure we’re giving them the right input so they can get the right output.” 

At Resideo, Lemon takes a three-pillar approach that addresses mental health, physical health, and financial well-being simultaneously. “For mental health, we make a resource available that goes deep into the mental wellness space, beyond meditation, but also including access to psychiatrists and therapists,” he said. The company also runs financial workshops and wellness challenges centered around nutrition and physical activity.

Focusing on Equity

With a workforce that includes Gen Z to Baby Boomers, the panel wrestled with how to ensure fairness without offering identical benefits to everyone. 

This can be especially difficult in times of constrained budgets. Every panelist acknowledged the growing tension between ambition and budget regarding well-being benefits. “Financial restraints are a reality for most of us,” Seman said. “Where are you getting optimal engagement with a measurable ROI? Every vendor will tell you they’ve got the greatest ROI. If that were the case, we’d all have 81-point solutions in place. The reality is not everything works for every individual.”

“We try to focus on making things equitable, but not equal, necessarily,” Halvorson said. “We have a lot of different benefits across our offerings, and it’s just what people really choose to engage with and interact with.”

Lemon emphasizes that a benefit’s value isn’t captured in utilization numbers. “We might still consider a benefit program to be successful because of the way that it ends up making our employees feel about working for our company,” he said. “It might be something that you choose to offer because you want to create an inclusive environment for your employees.”

Halvorson described Thomson Reuters’ “work from anywhere” policy, which allows employees to work remotely for four to eight weeks at a stretch. “We don’t say what they have to do, or we don’t constrain it to what they can do while they’re away,” she said. “I’ve seen some new moms say, ‘I got to get out of the Minnesota winter, and I’m going to be down in Florida for two weeks, so that my kids can be outside and on the beach.’ I’ve even seen people say, ‘I don’t want to commute to work in the middle weeks of January.’ We don’t judge how people use it.”

For Halvorson, the future of well-being may lie less in adding new benefits and more in personalizing recognition. She shared an emerging conversation at Thomson Reuters: “At times when we have top-performing employees, we give out a cash bonus, or maybe some equity. Would you appreciate it more, though, if we said, " Hey, I know that you’re really into wellness. Maybe I’ll pay for you to go to a wellness retreat for a week instead, or maybe I’ll pay for your gym membership.” 

The goal, she said, is to signal to employees: “We know them, we value them, and we want to give them a little bit of choice in how they feel recognized and valued.”

One unifying message stood out as the panel discussion came to an end: an effective well-being strategy requires listening deeply, challenging old assumptions, and trusting employees to know what they need. Simply rolling out as many benefits as possible isn’t enough. 

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

(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)