Benefits brokers who want to retain clients through 2030 must move well beyond annual renewal conversations and embrace a year-round engagement model that humanizes the programs they design.
That’s a key message from Kara Hoogensen, senior vice president of workplace benefits and protection at Principal Financial Group in Des Moines, Iowa, who told Insurance Business Benefits US that advisors can deliver lasting value in an era of soaring healthcare costs, shrinking HR departments, and rapid consolidation.
Principal's quarterly Financial Well-Being Index which surveys business owners, key decision makers, and executive leaders across organizations ranging from two to 10,000 employees, found that 58 percent of employers are concerned about the cost of healthcare, making it the number one concern overall.
The cost of offering benefits ranks second, cited by 50 percent of respondents. But even in the face of that pressure, employers are not pulling back because they know benefits remain a primary tool for attracting and retaining workers.
"Value is the name of the game," Hoogensen said, "but value isn't something that immediately comes. There has to be intentionality around how the value is provided."
On the healthcare cost side, she said brokers are increasingly steering employer clients toward alternative funding strategies such as individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements (ICHRAs), stop-loss plan design changes, and pharmacy benefit carve-outs among them.
These decisions directly affect how much budget remains for voluntary and ancillary products, making the broker's advisory role more consequential than ever.
Hoogensen pointed to the multigenerational makeup of today's workforce as a structural challenge that plan sponsors and their brokers must address head-on. With as many as five generations now sharing the same office or worksite, a one-size-fits-all benefits package fails almost by definition.
Principal's Work and Worth research found that employees who feel their employer's benefits program is relevant to their lives are 1.2 times more likely to feel included at work. That sense of inclusion, Hoogensen said, translates directly into discretionary effort.
"If you feel like you're welcome and included in the workplace and that someone is actually caring about you in a way that transcends the workplace, you're more likely to expend discretionary effort and energy towards the work that you're being asked to do," she said.
The same research also found that benefits strengthen loyalty even when they go unused.
Employees whose colleagues access accident insurance or critical illness coverage and see those benefits pay off during a difficult moment show 22 percent more loyalty to their employer than those in workplaces where such protections are absent. The implication for brokers is significant: breadth of program design matters, not just cost efficiency.
Hoogensen stressed that brokers and employers need a deliberate, year-round communication strategy and Principal has developed a quarter-by-quarter framework to help advisors structure that engagement with their clients.
In the first quarter, the focus falls on implementation and employee support: helping workers understand and actually use the benefits they enrolled in, reinforcing coverage they may not fully grasp, and providing access to tools and educational resources while open enrollment is still fresh.
The second quarter shifts to listening; gathering feedback through surveys, focus groups, or informal conversations to identify which benefits employees value most, where awareness gaps exist, and where unmet needs may point to voluntary benefit opportunities.
By the third quarter, those insights feed directly into plan design and renewal strategy. Brokers and plan sponsors evaluate potential changes, weigh new offerings, and align the benefits program with what the workforce has said it actually needs.
The fourth quarter returns to enrollment and decision support: targeted communications across multiple channels including email, internal websites, in-person meetings, and mobile tools and tailored to different employee groups and their preferred ways of receiving information.
Hoogensen cited a community credit union that uses short-form TikTok videos to walk employees through specific benefits, a tactic that has proven effective with younger members of its workforce.
"Simple doesn't mean ineffective," Hoogensen said. "Simple can actually be quite effective."
She recommended that employers, ideally in partnership with their broker or consultant, conduct periodic listening tours to reassess whether the benefits mix still reflects the actual workforce. If a wave of retirements has dropped the average employee age by ten years, the program should reflect that shift.
One of the most consequential market dynamics Hoogensen identified is the reduction in HR department headcount driven by cost pressures and general inflation. As HR teams shrink, the work does not disappear, but it may shift to brokers and consultants.
"There's an even higher degree of dependence on the broker and/or the consultant," she said, "not only for their subject matter expertise… but they're also looking to that broker to bring fresh new ideas to help them manage the benefits program."
That expanded role increasingly includes technology guidance such as payroll platforms integrated with benefits administration, digital enrollment tools that eliminate paper-heavy processes, and the kind of end-to-end operational support that HR departments once handled internally.
For small and mid-sized employers in particular, where the "HR department" may be the business owner, the office manager, or the CFO, the broker is effectively functioning as an outsourced benefits expert. That dynamic is only intensifying.
Looking toward 2030, Hoogensen said the brokerage landscape will be defined by three forces: continued consolidation among broker and consultant firms, accelerating adoption of technology including artificial intelligence, and a widening talent gap as experienced advisors retire.
She estimated that the average age of a US benefits broker or consultant today falls somewhere between 55 and 60. "That's a lot of knowledge that is soon going to be… opening a new chapter," she said, "and there's just not the influx of talent."
Technology including Principal's recently announced acquisition of Beam, a dental and vision benefits platform serving small and mid-sized employers is part of the answer.
Hoogensen described the Beam deal as "symbiotic," combining Principal's service model with Beam's digital quoting and enrollment capabilities to create a more efficient experience for brokers, employers, and employees alike.
But she was clear that technology is a complement to human judgment, not a substitute for it. "We don't view a computer as a trusted advisor," she said. "Generally speaking, it's the human that you're talking to that's the trusted advisor."
As consolidation intensifies and new entrants try to capture market share with technology-first propositions, Hoogensen expects that the brokers who combine digital efficiency with genuine, consistent human engagement will be the ones who retain clients and box out competitors.
