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Renewal season is one of the highest-pressure stretches of the year for benefits leaders, and raising the deductible or shifting a bit more cost to employees is often the fastest way to hit this year’s budget number. But it doesn’t change what’s driving costs up in the first place — so next renewal, you’re back in the same spot. Three benefits leaders are taking a different approach.
We recently sat down with Tabitha Pittman, Director of Global Benefits at Integrity; Manveen Mahal, Director of Global Benefits at The Wonderful Company (Wonderful Pistachios, FIJI Water, POM Wonderful); and Andor Molnar, Vice President of Benefits at Daikin. Their organizations are quite different from one another — an insurance distributor spanning 46 states, a global agricultural and consumer products company, and a manufacturer running a 4.2-million-square-foot plant — but they’ve landed on a similar idea from three different directions: the way to bend cost sustainably is to address what’s driving it.
Here are five moves they’re making.
1. Ask yourself: What’s the business problem you’re solving for?
Raising the deductible or employee contributions is usually the fastest way to hit the budget, but it’s rarely the most effective one. Integrity’s Tabitha Pittman described the shift in mindset that changed things for her team: renewal season “becomes an exercise in vendor presentation, and it becomes an exercise in cost shifting” unless you start with a different question: What business problem are we trying to solve, and how can the benefits program help solve it? Asked that way, a renewal conversation becomes less of a negotiation over who absorbs the cost, and more of a shared problem the whole leadership team can work on together.
2. Bring care to where people already are.
For a workforce spread across agricultural fields and production lines, “just go see a doctor” can mean a months-long wait and a trip nobody has time for. Manveen Mahal’s team at The Wonderful Company built onsite clinics offering free advanced primary care, health coaching, behavioral health support, and physical therapy for employees and their family members. The effect wasn’t just convenience. Internal data shows clinic patients have lower overall healthcare costs than employees who don’t use it.
3. Catch it before it becomes a claim.
Andor Molnar’s team at Daikin runs a 7,000-person plant with real infrastructure behind early detection: onsite A1C testing, so an employee trending toward diabetes gets referred before the diagnosis, not after. The logic is straightforward even if the payoff isn’t immediate: “getting them treated now, before it becomes full-blown diabetes, is significant savings,” he said. Savings that might not show up in this year’s numbers, but show up eventually, and compound.
4. Design around real behavior, not the benchmark.
Pittman’s reframe: “I’m not really worried about the benchmark, because the insurance company made the benchmark. What I’m worried about is what my people need.” In practice, that meant consolidating from several confusing plan options down to two clear ones — a rich PPO with $0 generic drug copays, $0 mental health copays, and low office-visit costs for people who need frequent care, and a high-deductible plan paired with real HSA education for people who’d rather bank the savings. Even the trade-offs here are redesigned around real behavior, not imposed by a benchmark — same population, two real paths, both built around what people do rather than what a benchmark says they should do.
5. Meet people in the language and format they use.
Molnar’s Daikin plant has employees speaking more than twenty different languages, and densely written benefits communication doesn’t reach most of them. His team’s fix: short, visual, largely non-verbal videos that walk through what’s changing and why. It’s a small production lift with an outsized payoff. A benefits package is only as valuable as people’s ability to understand it, and understanding doesn’t require a shared first language if the format doesn’t depend on one.
Pittman raised an expectation gap that’s becoming impossible to ignore: employees increasingly compare their benefits experience to the instant, conversational answers they get from consumer AI tools, and wonder why the plan itself can’t do the same. That gap between what people expect and what most benefits infrastructure can deliver is quickly becoming its own strategic question, not just a service-quality one.
The throughline across all five moves isn’t really about any single tactic. It’s a mindset shift: from managing this year’s number to shifting the actual risk underneath it — earlier detection, better access, and communication that reaches the whole workforce, not just the parts fluent in benefits jargon.
Andor Molnar and Tabitha Pittman are both upcoming guests on Season 4 of The Benefits Playbook, joining recent conversations with leaders from companies like The Wonderful Company, Albertsons Companies, SmithRx, and Gallagher. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.
