Written by Turiya Gray

Turiya Gray is a dynamic HR executive with 20+ years of experience building workplaces where people and performance actually thrive. Turiya is obsessed with making work better for everyone and known for her sharp insights, impactful leadership, and passion for helping organizations get people and culture right. She is also the cohost of the top-rated HR unConfidential podcast that launched in 2018. Currently, Turiya serves as Senior Partner & Fractional Chief People Officer at FXG Partners, partnering with midsize companies to deliver thoughtful, high-impact HR leadership.

Connect with Turiya on LinkedIn.

I’ve built and rebuilt HR tech infrastructure at scaling companies more than once, and there’s a very real tipping point that shows up somewhere between 100 and 300 employees. When people search for an HR tech stack for midsize companies, they’re usually in this exact stage.

Processes that were once good enough quietly morph into time thieves. Employee experience becomes more complex and less consistent. You lose visibility into people-related trends and costs. And HR teams find themselves stitching together workarounds instead of shaping the business.

If you’re evaluating your HR tech stack as your company grows or wondering when it’s time to move beyond what’s been working, read on for some practical insights from someone who’s been there. This isn’t a best tools list; it’s my reflections on how I’d build my HR tech stack if I were stepping into a 200–300-person company tomorrow, grounded in what I’ve seen work (and fail) in real life.

Why 200–300 employees changes everything

At 50–100 employees, HR can often rely on proximity and memory. You know people by name, the exceptions are manageable, and the homegrown workarounds are known and seem to “work.”

Somewhere between 200 and 300 employees, that model stops working. It’s not just more people; it’s more layers of management, a more dynamic employee population (locations, job types, tenure, etc.), and increasing demands on HR’s time and impact.

The operational symptoms, like inefficient processes, lack of clean data, and poor employee experience, show up fast. But underneath those symptoms, bigger strategic issues start to emerge:

• HR team burnout. The HR team’s workload expands with every new hire, but headcount doesn’t keep pace. What used to feel manageable starts to crowd out the work that actually moves the business forward: strategic planning, leadership development, and culture building. 
• Loss of prioritization.  Without systems to surface patterns and data to guide decisions, everything feels equally urgent. HR ends up reacting to whoever’s loudest instead of focusing on what will have the most impact.
• Credibility gap. The business starts to experience HR as process managers instead of business enablers; not because of intent, but because of capacity and tooling gaps.
• Reactive decision-making. Without clean data, people-related decisions become opinion-based instead of business-backed.

At this size, you’re small enough that inefficiency hits hard in HR bandwidth, leadership effectiveness, and the bottom line. But you’re big enough that “we’ll fix it later” is no longer a viable strategy. This is when HR tech stops being a convenience and becomes critical infrastructure.

The HR tech stack I’d build for a midsize company (200–300 employees)

At this stage, I resist the urge to jump to specific tools first. I start by thinking about the ideal outcomes.

If your company is hovering around 200 employees with a patchwork tech stack, the first move is almost always to stabilize your HRIS and payroll. If that foundation is shaky, every other system you add will require more cleanup, more manual work, and more frustration. Once that’s solid, move to hiring and onboarding, then everything else.

Here are the core layers I’d focus on:

1. A strong system of record (HRIS + payroll)

This is your foundation and it needs to be boring but reliable and scalable. Clear processes, clean data, compliance, and integrations that don’t require duct tape are critical.

I’ve used systems like Rippling, Namely, and UKG at this stage. Each had different strengths depending on the company’s complexity and growth trajectory.

What to look for:

• Reporting that doesn’t require a data analyst to build
• Flexible permissions as you add managers, admins, or employee self-service
• Integrations that actually work (and stay working)
• Data that flows to and from other systems without constant manual fixes

2. Hiring and onboarding that feel seamless

Hiring and onboarding set the tone for every employee relationship. A clunky process here creates drag for recruiters, confusion for candidates, and a rocky start for new hires.

I’ve implemented Greenhouse and SilkRoad (now Rival) for applicant tracking and onboarding based on the customization and seamless integration experience. 

What to look for:

• Automation where it matters: scheduling, posting, screening questions
• A clear stance on how AI reduces bias without introducing new risks (like fake applicants flooding your pool)
• Hiring manager access to review candidates and provide feedback without creating bottlenecks
• Seamless handoff from “offer accepted” to “first-day ready,” whether that’s in one system or two that integrate flawlessly
• Compliance tracking (I-9s, new hire paperwork, etc.) that’s simple and auditable
• Flexibility to customize onboarding based on role, location, or team

3. Performance tools that don’t turn into bureaucracy

You need easy-to-use tools that offer simple goal-setting, the ability to run performance feedback cycles that actually fit your business needs and culture, and that strengthen manager capability without turning performance into a time-intensive exercise.

I’ve worked with tools like Lattice and 15Five. The key was picking one that met our unique needs rather than forcing our culture to match the tool.

What to look for:

• Lightweight enough that managers will actually use it
• Customizable cycles (not rigid annual reviews if that’s not your style)
• Integration with your HRIS so you’re not managing two sets of employee data

4. Making total rewards actually manageable

This is the layer that breaks fastest when you scale. How you manage compensation, benefits administration, perks/stipends, and recognition quietly turns into admin chaos, compliance headaches, and employee frustration.

Before implementing Compt, my team was fielding a lot of eligibility questions about our perks program and spent hours processing stipend requests. Compt brought structure: employees got clarity on what they could use, Finance got real-time visibility into spend, and HR got meaningful time back (often 10+ hours a month).

Compt just worked, and that’s exactly what all of your HR tech stack should do.

What to look for:

• Compensation planning tools that integrate with your HRIS (so you’re not exporting spreadsheets to model raises, promotions, or equity)
• Benefits administration that reduces enrollment headaches (employee self-service, carrier integrations, and clear communication at open enrollment)
• Employee self-service for perks and stipends (so HR isn’t answering the same questions repeatedly)
• Finance-friendly reporting (clean visibility into spend and ROI)
• Flexibility to adjust as your total rewards offerings evolve

Before adding any tool, I always ask:

• What real pain does this solve for HR and the business?
• Who will use this system regularly, and do I need their input?
• Does this reduce admin or add to it?
• Will this still work at 500+ employees?

If the answers aren’t clear, I pause.

What I’d do differently if I were building this tomorrow

I’ve built versions of this HR tech stack that worked beautifully and versions that didn’t. Looking back, the difference wasn’t the tools themselves. It was how thoughtfully we selected and implemented them, how clearly we defined success, and whether we treated vendors as partners or just checked boxes. 

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Define ROI upfront, both qualitative and quantitative.
Time saved, employee usage, reduction in questions, decision speed; know what success looks like before implementation.

Sequence deliberately.
Get your foundation stable before layering on additional tools. You can’t build a performance management strategy on top of unreliable employee data.

Revisit ROI regularly.
If a system isn’t saving time, improving insight, or strengthening employee experience, ask why it’s still there.

Balance scalability with restraint.
Buy for where you’re going, but don’t overbuild for a future that’s still hypothetical.

Bring Finance and IT in earlier.
It saves money, rework, and credibility later. They’ll catch integration issues and budget realities you might miss.

Negotiate like a partner, not a buyer.
Don’t just accept the first proposal. Ask about cost flexibility, what features might be available as add-ons (now or later), and what post-implementation support actually looks like (response times, dedicated account management, training resources). The best vendor relationships are built on clarity upfront, not surprises six months in.

Let AI inform priorities, not distract you.
Ask hard questions about data protection, how information is used, and whether it actually makes life easier and reduces bias or just introduces new risks.

Don’t skip change management.
Even great tools fail if no one uses them. Implementation isn’t just turning the system on; it’s communication, training, and making sure it sticks.

The goal isn’t the biggest stack. It’s the right one.

Final thoughts

This stage of growth is demanding, and the stakes are real. But it’s also where HR has the chance to evolve from “keeping things running” to building systems that actually enable performance and long-term growth.

If you’re navigating this transition now, you’re not behind; you’re exactly where you should be. And with the right foundation, you’ll give yourself room to breathe, grow, and actually lead.

The post HR Tech Stack for Midsize Companies: What I’d Build at 200–300 Employees appeared first on COMPT.

Employee benefits have exploded in complexity, with SHRM now tracking 216 distinct benefits (up 23% from just two years prior). Among Compt users, Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) are the largest category — two-thirds of our users offered one to their employees last year.

The LSA’s appeal is obvious: employees get flexibility, while HR gets simplicity and Finance gets better cost control. And in a world where seven in 10 American workers are at least somewhat dissatisfied with their benefits, offering something personalized feels like an easy win.

What HR and Finance teams aren’t hearing on vendor calls, though, is that the way they administer their lifestyle benefits could be creating tremendous IRS compliance exposure — and that, in practice, lifestyle benefits and IRS compliance are inseparable.

A few issues that come to mind:

• Taxable wellness expenses coded as tax-free
• Nontaxable categories overtaxed to play it safe
• Pre-funded benefits cards creating unclear tax timing
• Zero audit trail connecting transactions to proper tax treatment

The issue isn’t whether lifestyle benefits are a good idea. They are. The issue is that the gap between how these programs are marketed and how they’re actually administered puts employers squarely in the IRS’s crosshairs, sometimes without anyone realizing it until an audit letter arrives.

We’re the vendor who’s going to spell it all out for you. Everything you need to know about lifestyle benefits and IRS compliance risks, right here, right now.

The IRS default Finance and HR need to understand

The IRS uses a “taxable unless excluded” framework for fringe benefits, which includes all your lifestyle benefits.

IRS Publication 15-B says:

• The default position is taxable. You must include lifestyle benefits in pay unless a specific exclusion applies.
• Exclusions are narrow and codified. They’re listed in Section 2 of Pub 15-B.
• The burden is on the employer. Not just for knowing an exclusion exists, but to be able to show, at the transaction level, exactly why it applied.

The exclusions are (deliberately) narrower than you might expect.

Gym memberships, for instance, are explicitly not deductible medical expenses under IRC Section 213(d), regardless of how healthy they are for your team. Neither are fitness classes, wellness apps, personal training, or meal delivery services.

And those kinds of things make up the bulk of LSA spending, which is why LSAs are generally — but not fully — taxable.

Taxable vs. nontaxable lifestyle benefits: what actually qualifies

We recently published in our 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmarking Report that the most popular LSA spend categories were health and wellness, learning and professional development, office equipment + cell and internet, and commuter.

Naturally, those are also the areas in which we see HR and Finance teams mess up the most often, so let’s take a look at what qualifies vs. what doesn’t in those four categories.

Health and wellness

Almost always taxable. Gym memberships, fitness classes, meditation apps, nutrition programs, and massage therapy are all considered general health and well-being expenses with no IRS exclusion.

The exception is medical care as defined under IRC Section 213(d), like smoking cessation programs and physician-prescribed treatments, which are nontaxable if you reimburse for them through a qualifying health plan (which is separate from an LSA).

Learning and professional development

It depends. Education that “maintains or improves skills required for the employee’s current job” can qualify as a nontaxable working condition benefit. And formal educational assistance under a qualifying educational assistance program is nontaxable up to $5,250 annually.

Same with student loan repayment assistance — nontaxable up to $5,250 per year when it’s part of a qualifying program.

But general enrichment courses and career-change education? Both taxable.

Home office + cell and internet 

This one’s more nuanced. Internet and cell phone reimbursements are nontaxable when you provide them primarily for business purposes (and prove it). A monitor or desk required for work may qualify as a working condition benefit.

But ergonomic upgrades for personal comfort, standing desk converters, or office décor? A nice touch for sure, and one they’re paying tax on.

Note: In 11 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Seattle, employers are generally required to reimburse employees for necessary work-related expenses — which may include business use of personal cell phones or internet service.

Commuter benefits

Nontaxable up to a certain amount. As an employer, you’re able to allocate up to $340 per month per employee for transit passes or qualified parking in 2026. It applies to buses, subways, trains, ferries, and vanpools, but standard Uber and Lyft rides are not eligible.

Cheat sheet: taxable vs. nontaxable lifestyle benefits

This distinction sits at the heart of lifestyle benefits and IRS compliance, because the IRS evaluates each expense individually, not the benefit program as a whole.

Psst: We’ve already published a complete guide to taxable vs. nontaxable fringe benefits. That’s where you’ll get the FULL rundown.

Where the IRS exposure lives in your lifestyle benefits program

We’ve been in the lifestyle benefits game for almost 10 years, and there are four main risk categories we’ve put our finger on: misclassification, inconsistent treatment, pre-funding timing issues, and cost leakage from overtaxing.

Misclassification is the most common problem.

Your employee gets reimbursed for a gym membership (taxable) but your expense tool treats it the same as a professional development course, which might qualify for exclusion. The system doesn’t know the difference, so it processes both identically.

When that gym reimbursement doesn’t show up on the employee’s W-2, you’ve got unreported wages and unpaid payroll taxes, which is a huge compliance gap the IRS will spot during an audit.

Inconsistent treatment compounds the issue.

Maybe one employee’s yoga class gets taxed and another’s doesn’t, depending on which manager approved it or how the receipt was coded. Generic payroll systems and corporate cards fail here because many rely on human categorization and after-the-fact tax handling.

Well … the IRS expects employers to apply the same tax treatment to the same type of benefit across the organization. Inconsistency raises a red flag that maybe — just maybe — you don’t have a compliant process at all.

Pre-funding timing creates its own exposure risks.

When you load money onto a benefits card at the start of the month, how’s it treated taxwise? If the funds are available to the employee without restriction, you might have to treat them as taxable wages the moment you fund them rather than when they’re spent.

Most generic prepaid card programs don’t account for this, though, which creates a timing mismatch that eventually snowballs across hundreds of employees.

Cost leakage from overtaxing might not trigger an IRS letter, but it’ll hurt your bottom line.

You’d be surprised, but some companies, unsure of the rules, just tax everything. That lowers your chances of getting audited (because it sort of “guarantees” you taxed the right things), but it also means employees pay double-digit taxes on benefits that could have been tax-free.

If your company does this, you’re paying unnecessary FICA (7.65%) while the benefit itself loses a huge percent of its value for your team members.

Why lifestyle benefits compliance matters beyond IRS audit risk

Administering lifestyle benefits comes with significant risks if you’re just pushing them through generic expense tools or payroll.

The flip side of that is also true. Properly administering them brings you a significant upside: it turns a potential tax liability into a strategic cost-savings engine that boosts employee purchasing power without increasing your payroll budget.

When you apply the rules correctly, a well-designed LSA reduces your taxable exposure.

This is the upside.

According to our internal data, 78% of stipend spend in 2025 fell into a taxable category. In other words, roughly 22% of spending does qualify for nontaxable treatment.

By no means is that a trivial number.

For a company spending $1,000 per employee annually on lifestyle benefits (which tracks with our benchmarking averages), proper treatment through an IRS-compliant platform would mean the difference between employees seeing that full $220 tax-free vs. having it added to their W-2.

IRS penalties scale with headcount.

For incorrect W-2 reporting (like failing to report taxable stipends in employees’ gross income), penalties reach $340 per return, with a maximum of $1.366 million for small businesses and $4.098 million for large ones.

So if you have a midsize team of 250 employees and they all had incorrect W-2s, you’re looking at noncompliance costs as high as $85,000 for that tax year.

Also worth mentioning: If the IRS determines your noncompliance is due to “intentional disregard,” fines are unlimited and start at a minimum of $680 per W-2.

M&A due diligence is another trigger.

Even if you see neither ‘M’ nor ‘A’ in your immediate future, it’s still worth knowing that employee benefit plans are a common source of hidden liabilities in both. Buyers routinely flag IRS reporting failures like misclassified benefits and underfunded tax obligations during eval.

If you’re running a lifestyle benefits program without transaction-level tax compliance, you are building a liability that will surface at the worst possible time, when you’re trying to close a deal, go public, or attract investors.

Then there’s the employee experience fallout.

When a compliance issue comes up, employers find themselves correcting past W-2s and 941s for open tax years. If that happens, your team members might have to amend their personal returns and could owe back taxes, plus interest.

Employees trusted that their wellness stipend was handled correctly. Learning they owe money because their employer got it wrong kills their confidence in your entire benefits program.

What compliant lifestyle benefits administration looks like

There are five pillars of compliant lifestyle benefits administration:

1. Transaction-level categorization
2. Rules-based enforcement
3. Real-time tax handling
4. Clean documentation
5. Multistate compliance

Let’s dive into each so you know what to look for in benefits software and how to set up your program.

1. Transaction-level categorization

By design, LSAs are catch-all budgets. Employees use the same allowance for wellness, learning, home office, and commuting. But from an IRS perspective, flexibility doesn’t change the rules; you treat the LSA allowance purely as a funding source, not a tax bucket.

Transaction-level categorization means your benefits software assigns tax treatment to each individual reimbursement within your employee’s broader LSA spending.

A …

• certification course,
• gym membership,
• and internet bill

… can all come from the same LSA balance, but the system categorizes them separately and situationally applies the appropriate tax treatment and documentation.

2. Rules-based enforcement

Categorization only works if your software’s backend applies those rules 100% of the time. When you have a manager/reviewer or payroll system reconciling and categorizing expenses after the fact, mistakes will be made at least some of the time.

In a compliant lifestyle benefits program, when an expense falls into a taxable category, it’s always taxed. If it qualifies for a specific exclusion, it’s treated as nontaxable and documented. And if it doesn’t meet the criteria, it’s flagged or reclassed before reimbursement happens.

3. Real-time tax handling

A lot of setups defer tax treatment until after they’ve approved, paid, or loaded expenses onto a card because again, most expense management and corporate card platforms are set up to focus on month-end reconciliation.

Tax-compliant LSA software closes that gap by determining “taxable” or “nontaxable” immediately, then auto-syncing the data with your payroll software before or at the moment of reimbursement.

4. Clean documentation

Properly allocating each expense is the first half of the battle. You now have to prove each tax-exempt benefit belongs in that category.

Three important considerations:

1. Every lifestyle benefit category has different qualification and reporting requirements. What you need to substantiate an education expense is not the same as what’s required for a commuter benefit.
2. Everything has to be centralized and permanent. Audits are backward-looking up to three years. If the IRS audits your company, you’re expected to produce receipts, classifications, and tax treatment decisions from the prior tax year.
3. There isn’t always a statute of limitations. The IRS can audit indefinitely if (a) an employee’s return was never filed or (b) the IRS can show it was filed with the intent of fraud or tax evasion.

Without centralized, permanent documentation, you have no practical way of defending tax treatment decisions years later. That’s why a compliant setup stores receipts, categories, applied tax logic, and timing alongside each transaction in a single system of record.

5. Multistate compliance

Most lifestyle benefits guidance focuses on federal rules, but it’s important to remember that states are sometimes different. Commuter benefits are a perfect example of this; federal law sets the tax exclusion limits for them, but states and cities set the participation rules.

For instance, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Jersey, and Massachusetts all mandate that eligible employers offer commuter benefits based on employee location. If you’re not careful, you might comply with federal tax exclusion limits but still be out of compliance locally.

So in addition to all of the above, you need a platform that applies your benefits based on each employee’s location in order to meet specific mandates across all 50 U.S. states without manual exceptions.

Compt simplifies multistate tax compliance for LSAs and lifestyle stipends.

Most of the IRS compliance risks associated with lifestyle benefits aren’t your fault. They ultimately boil down to the fact that the tools companies use to run them weren’t built to handle their nuance and complexity.

• Payroll systems calculate taxes but don’t evaluate benefit eligibility.
• Expense tools move money but don’t apply IRS exclusions.
• Corporate cards simplify spending but flatten tax treatment.

Compt does all three.

Whenever someone submits an expense for reimbursement, it helps HR cross-reference eligibility and categorize it against IRS rules. It integrates with your payroll through a bidirectional API connection, so the right amounts show up on W-2s automatically.

The employee doesn’t have to worry about it, and HR can be confident they have the proper support. And more importantly, neither will have to worry about it come tax season.

Ready to see what IRS-compliant lifestyle benefits look like in practice? Request a demo of Compt.

FAQs: IRS compliance for lifestyle benefits

Editor’s note: Compt software supports the categorization and proper reporting of benefits according to IRS guidelines, helping businesses maintain compliance. However, Compt cannot provide tax advice, and users should consult their own tax, legal, and accounting advisors when necessary.

The post Lifestyle Benefits and IRS Compliance: Complete Guide for HR and Finance appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Theresa Fesinstine

Theresa Fesinstine is a 25-year HR executive and founder of peoplepower.ai, a leading education platform helping HR leaders confidently adopt and apply AI at work. She is the author of People Powered by AI: A Playbook for HR Leaders Ready to Shape the Future of Work, a practical guide to integrating ethical, strategic, and human-centered AI into People and Culture teams.

She also writes People Power Pulse, a LinkedIn newsletter followed by 6,000+ HR professionals, and serves as an adjunct professor at The City College of New York, teaching AI in Business and HR Management.

Across her work as an educator, advisor, and keynote speaker, Theresa is guided by one question: how do we build a future of work that is people-first and AI-forward? She helps HR teams navigate transformation with clarity, confidence, and a commitment to culture.

Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn.

There is a shift happening in the workplace, but it is not showing up neatly in engagement scores or quarterly dashboards. It is quieter than that, more personal, and often harder to name. You can feel it in the growing gap between what people experience outside of work and what they are still expected to tolerate once they log in.

It shows up in small moments that, taken alone, might seem insignificant. A team member growing impatient with the slow cadence of internal approvals. A high performer wondering why they are still manually searching for development opportunities when consumer platforms seem to anticipate their needs without being asked. A new hire, already frustrated that getting a simple answer from HR requires navigating three tools, two time zones, and a lot of guesswork.

What sits underneath these moments is not laziness or entitlement, and it is not a lack of effort from HR teams. It is something more structural. Employee expectations are no longer shaped primarily by work itself. They are being shaped by the technologies people live with every day, and increasingly, by AI-enabled systems that quietly redefine what feels reasonable.

In my work advising HR and People teams navigating AI adoption, I see this gap emerge not from resistance, but from uncertainty about how to lead with care.

The expectation gap most organizations misread

In conversations with HR and People leaders, I often hear a familiar skepticism. It usually sounds measured and well-intentioned. “We’re not sure our people are ready for this.” Or, “We don’t want to depersonalize the employee experience.”

Those concerns make sense on the surface, but they are built on a false premise. Employees are not encountering AI for the first time at work. They are already using it daily. At home. On their phones. Increasingly, in their workflows, whether or not their organization has formally acknowledged it.

What employees are asking for is not unrestricted technology or blind adoption. They are asking for clarity and care. They want to understand how AI is being used, where it fits, and how it supports them rather than quietly evaluating them. When organizations hesitate, it is often framed as protection. But when that hesitation turns into gatekeeping, it creates a different risk. People start experimenting on their own, without shared guardrails, and the organization loses the opportunity to design trust intentionally.

The idea that AI will dehumanize HR also misses what is actually happening. AI does not remove humanity from people systems. It exposes where humanity has been stretched too thin or deprioritized. If the employee experience already feels fragmented, slow, or transactional, AI will not cause that problem; it will make it more visible. It will raise the standard for what “support” looks like, and it will surface where HR is carrying more load than it should without the infrastructure to match.

So the question is not whether AI belongs in HR and EX. The more honest question is this: How do we design empathy at scale, inside systems that were never built to deliver it?

What quiet AI adoption actually looks like inside real organizations

The most meaningful AI-enabled changes rarely look like transformation programs. They look like relief: Less manual work. Fewer dead ends. Faster access to answers. Earlier signals. Better conversations.

At peoplepower.ai, we have had the privilege of walking alongside HR and EX teams as they explore what responsible adoption can actually look like, in the messiness of real organizations.

In one midsize company, we helped reimagine their engagement analysis process using natural language processing. What once took six weeks of spreadsheet wrangling and manual theme coding now takes hours. That time was not just saved; it was redeployed into higher-value employee focused work, including listening circles, manager enablement, and deeper cultural diagnostics. The win was not efficiency. The win was capacity, and what that capacity made possible.

In another case, a global client used predictive tools to surface early burnout signals within a customer care team. The important detail is what happened next. They did not issue a blanket mandate or roll out another generic well-being campaign. They equipped managers with context, training, and language so they could respond in a way that felt human rather than performative. What followed was not just a reduction in burnout indicators. It was an increase in trust, because employees felt seen earlier and supported more consistently.

These are not flashy AI stories that depend on novelty. They are real examples of teams exploring what is possible with care, enabled by technology and expressed through humans. That is the pattern worth paying attention to.

How HR leaders can respond without losing the plot

One of the biggest risks right now is that HR gets pulled into the wrong kind of urgency. The market wants strategies, platforms, and roadmaps. Vendors want use cases. Leaders want quick wins. Meanwhile, employees want something simpler and harder at the same time. They want work to feel less frustrating. They want support to feel more accessible. They want systems to feel like they were designed for humans.

HR teams do not need another AI strategy deck. We need grounded, human-first actions that help HR teams move forward without creating fear, confusion, or unintended harm.

Final thought: The future is being built in the background.

Most organizations that will lead the next decade of employee experience will not do it through big headlines or massive overhauls. They will do it in the quiet redesign of how care is delivered at work. They will notice where employees lose time. They will fix the handoffs that create frustration. They will build systems that surface answers and signals sooner. They will equip managers to respond like humans, not policy enforcers.

They will also be honest about what AI is doing, what it is not doing, and where accountability sits. Because trust does not come from pretending technology is neutral. It comes from clarity, consistency, and the willingness to center dignity as much as efficiency.

At the end of the day, AI will not define the future of employee experience. People will. The leaders who hold both the technology and humanity with intention are the ones designing workplaces worth staying for.

The post The Future of Employee Experience: How AI Is Quietly Rewriting What Workers Expect appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Turiya Gray

Turiya Gray is a dynamic HR executive with 20+ years of experience building workplaces where people and performance actually thrive. Turiya is obsessed with making work better for everyone and known for her sharp insights, impactful leadership, and passion for helping organizations get people and culture right. She is also the cohost of the top-rated HR unConfidential podcast that launched in 2018. Currently, Turiya serves as Senior Partner & Fractional Chief People Officer at FXG Partners, partnering with midsize companies to deliver thoughtful, high-impact HR leadership.

Connect with Turiya on LinkedIn.

I’m sure many of my HR friends remember what was happening in the workplace in summer 2021: COVID uncertainty, remote-work fatigue, burnout everywhere. Employee well-being had officially shifted from “nice to have” to “business critical,” and the Great Resignation was prompting every company to rethink how they attracted, retained, and meaningfully supported their people.

I stepped into the Chief People Officer role at a 300-person HR technology software firm in the midst of this “unprecedented time” with all things Total Rewards at the top of my priority list. While our long-term work included building a clear rewards philosophy, modernizing compensation, and evolving benefits, I quickly realized we had a more immediate opportunity: our employee perks.

Like many companies, we offered perks that were well-intentioned but we questioned whether they were the right investments for our people. So instead of tweaking around the edges, we chose to start fresh by grounding everything in empathy, strategy, and real data.

Starting where every good HR project starts: with the truth

Before we could introduce anything new, we needed an unfiltered view of what already existed. Too often, HR teams jump straight to solutions, but without the truth, you end up solving the wrong problem.

We began by mapping our current perks ecosystem end-to-end to better understand what we offered, who actually used it, what it cost, and how easy (or not) it was to administer. We discovered that many of our current perks were underutilized, misaligned, or simply too complicated to be worth the effort.

This data told us what was happening, but now we needed to know why. So we went straight to the source, our employees, to get their feedback and help on shaping the path forward. 

Our incredible People Ops Director at the time led a companywide perks survey asking employees what they valued, what they could live without, and what they wished we offered. We also sat down with our ERGs to better understand unique needs across identities and lived experiences, because “one-size-fits-all” never actually fits anyone.

Within weeks, we had a clearer picture of what mattered most to our employees. They wanted perks that offered flexibility, aligned with their actual lives, and were clear and accessible.

Building something better — and more human

Armed with these insights from employees, we set out to rebuild a perks program that truly worked for our people and for the business. 

Our goal was simple but ambitious: design a program that reflected our values, aligned with our newly crafted Total Rewards philosophy, supported diverse needs, and could scale alongside the company. Equally important? It had to be much easier for our Benefits Manager to administer (more on this below!).

Here’s where we landed:

• We evolved some existing perks. Our home-office stipend was revamped, we added tuition reimbursement to our learning and development stipend, and we expanded our family planning support and family concierge services. We also expanded our gender-affirming care stipend to better meet the needs of eligible employees.
• We offered some new options. We introduced a wellness/fitness stipend and a therapy stipend. One key learning was that having a standalone therapy stipend was important to our employees. Culturally, it sent a message that employees wouldn’t have to choose between using the wellness stipend for a gym membership or therapy — they could do both. Operationally, it mitigated potential barriers to access to mental health support for employees who wanted to reduce their out-of-pocket costs.
• We thought beyond the stipends. In addition to financial-based stipends, the feedback from employees elevated a need for more holistic well-being support. We introduced monthly self-care days and no-meeting Fridays as a starting point to address some of the things that were impacting employee productivity and morale.

After crunching the numbers and securing buy-in from other execs, it was time to put our new program into action. This included the critical step of solving for ease of use and administration.

Enter Compt — our secret weapon

Designing the right perks program was only half the challenge. The other half that every HR leader knows all too well is making sure the program could actually run without burning out our People team and confusing employees.

Our Benefits Manager was (and still is) an absolute rockstar: service-oriented, committed to a top-notch employee experience, and has never met a challenge she wouldn’t tackle head-on. However, she had too many manual tasks to manage. Things like verifying receipts, untangling spreadsheets, and chasing the never-ending “Where do I submit this?” questions were taking up a lot of her time. 

We needed a way to administer the perks program that was flexible, compliant, easy for employees to navigate, and met the needs of our program administrators and friends in Finance. This is where Compt was a lifesaver!

After researching a few tools, we landed on Compt because it offered exactly what we needed: an employee lifestyle benefits platform that allowed us to:

• Set up multiple stipends, each with its own amount, cadence, and eligibility criteria.
• Vastly improve the employee experience with visibility into exactly what was available to them, what they’d submitted throughout the year, and balances they should be sure to use before any cut-off dates. It also created a smooth submission process — no more hunting for forms!
• Ensure compliance and protect employee privacy, especially for sensitive categories like mental health.
• Easily track real-time utilization (with some amazing, detailed reports) so we could monitor the effectiveness of our new program on an ongoing basis.
• Provide our Finance friends visibility into utilization and spend so budgets can be monitored and updated accordingly.
• Eliminate manual approvals with automated workflows that would scale with us as the company grew.

The outcome? Employees loved the flexibility. Finance appreciated the accuracy and transparency. Our Benefits Manager loved the administrative simplicity and the tons of time she got back!

Compt helped us take a human-centered perks strategy and operationalize it in a modern, scalable, data-driven way. It was the right strategy and the right system working together.

What I learned

Rebuilding a perks program in the midst of workplace disruption confirmed for me the power of human-centered design and that companies should do their best to meet people where they are. When you strip away assumptions and actually listen, employees will tell you exactly what they need. When you pair that insight with flexible, well-designed, well-administered programs, the results are undeniable.

Companies and HR/Total Rewards leaders are navigating rising costs (e.g., healthcare and other operational costs), which means every investment has to be the right one. Perks can’t be viewed as just the “extras” off to the side that go unmanaged and unmonitored until it’s time to cut costs. They must be strategic and responsive to your unique business and employee needs in a way that strengthens trust, culture, and performance.

If you’re rethinking how to design perks that actually work for your people and your HR team, request a demo to see how Compt makes flexible, human-centered benefits easy to run.

Want more customer input? View all of Compt’s case studies.

The post Why I Chose Compt for Our Employee Perks Program appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Theresa Fesinstine

Theresa Fesinstine is a 25-year HR executive and founder of peoplepower.ai, a leading education platform helping HR leaders confidently adopt and apply AI at work. She is the author of People Powered by AI: A Playbook for HR Leaders Ready to Shape the Future of Work, a practical guide to integrating ethical, strategic, and human-centered AI into People and Culture teams.

She also writes People Power Pulse, a LinkedIn newsletter followed by 6,000+ HR professionals, and serves as an adjunct professor at The City College of New York, teaching AI in Business and HR Management.

Across her work as an educator, advisor, and keynote speaker, Theresa is guided by one question: how do we build a future of work that is people-first and AI-forward? She helps HR teams navigate transformation with clarity, confidence, and a commitment to culture.

Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn.

“Can I ask you something without sounding dumb?”

That’s how a lot of conversations with HR leaders start these days. I hear it during workshops, after keynotes, at my monthly AI Quick Clinics, and in DMs from people who’ve been leading culture and talent for decades.

They’re not unsure about HR. They’re unsure about AI. They don’t know how to start or what to trust, and many of them already feel behind.

What follows is a version of what I’ve shared in those off-mic, off-stage conversations. These aren’t curated answers from a product sheet or vendor deck. They come from my own work as an AI for HR Educator on a mission to help HR teams explore, adopt, and operationalize AI through a people-first, AI-forward approach.

1. “How do I start using AI if I’m not technical?”

The biggest misconception I see is the idea that there are some magical technical requirements to use AI that HR leaders don’t have. This may have been the case seven years ago when I was stuck  in a General Assembly course trying to learn Tableau, but today it’s different. 

Leveraging AI is a leadership skill now — not a coding one. You don’t need to become an engineer. You need to become fluent in understanding what you need and asking for AI to assist the work you already do.

The fastest way to build confidence is to use AI on tasks you already know how to do and evaluate the results. Draft a job description using your preferred structure, then ask your Generative AI (GenAI) tool of choice (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, etc.) to generate a version based on it. Compare the two. Ask it to summarize a policy, prep notes for a stay interview, or analyze feedback from an exit survey. This is how you begin to understand how the tool “thinks.”

When I lead safe-to-learn sessions with HR teams, we’re not starting with tech. We’re starting with use cases. People quickly realize that AI isn’t taking their work, but it has the potential to make parts of it lighter. That’s where the confidence comes in: not from mastering the tool, but from seeing where it can make space for deeper, more meaningful work.

2. “What AI tools are actually safe, compliant, and HR-ready?”

There’s a lot of noise in the market right now, and HR leaders are understandably cautious. Every day, a new tool claims to “revolutionize HR,” but not every tool is compliant, secure, or actually built with people in mind.

Here’s the framework I offer:

• Separate experimentation from enterprise. ChatGPT might be your go-to tool for quick drafts or brainstorming, but unless you are on a team or enterprise account, it’s not built for sensitive employee data. 
• When evaluating HR tech vendors, ask better questions. Don’t just ask “Do you use AI?” Ask:
  • How is your AI trained and tested for bias?
  • Can you explain how decisions are made (transparency)?
  • What data is retained and how is it secured?
  • Are you embedding AI in workflows, or layering it on top?
  • How are you trained internally to leverage AI?

If they don’t have clear answers (or worse, if they can’t explain it in plain language), it’s a red flag. Stand firm that you need tools that align with your ethical standards, your regulatory responsibilities, and the trust employees place in you.

3. “How do I make sure AI doesn’t replace the human parts of HR?”

The fear isn’t just job loss. It’s culture loss. It’s the fear that, in the name of speed and efficiency, we’ll lose what makes our workplaces real: trust, conversation, relationships.

What I tell teams is this: AI doesn’t know your culture. You do.

AI can help with workflows, process optimization, summarization, and yes, even complex strategy and decision support. But it doesn’t lead with empathy. It doesn’t ask clarifying questions in a performance conversation. It doesn’t see the nuance in an employee’s shift in tone or expression. It can’t spot culture misalignment in a hiring interview. That’s your domain.

What we can do is use AI to reduce cognitive load and make more space for the emotional labor and leadership that HR excels at. For example: 

• Using AI to draft the framework for onboarding communications gives HRBPs more time to meet with new hires face to face. 
• Letting AI create more dynamic and exciting ways to onboard new employees creates more connected and engaged new hires. 
• Leveraging secure AI tools for engagement survey insights can free up the People Analytics lead to explore root causes more deeply.

It’s not AI or People … it’s both, when you design it that way.

4. “How do I upskill my HR team so we don’t fall behind?”

There’s a quiet but persistent pressure many HR leaders are feeling: the belief that we’re supposed to already have a fully formed AI strategy, and somehow also be ready to teach it to everyone else. That kind of pressure shuts down experimentation before it even starts.

The reality is, technical certifications aren’t a realistic path forward for most HR teams. The time and the workload we all face makes the intensity of this approach daunting. The more effective — and sustainable — approach is building fluency through real-world use. Peer learning. Safe-to-try spaces. Targeted working sessions with experts. Small experiments that create forward motion without overwhelming the team.

That’s the approach I’ve built my own work around, because it mirrors how HR actually learns: by applying tools to people-centered challenges and reflecting in real time. When HR teams create conditions for learning vs. expecting immediate expertise, they not only build capability, they build confidence.

Here’s what I recommend after a foundations workshop:

• Set aside intentional time for hands-on exploration. Start with everyday use cases: prompting for a policy rewrite, role-playing a difficult conversation, or analyzing exit survey themes.
• Create internal AI learning circles. Let small teams test tools together and report back what they learned — what worked, what didn’t, what surprised them.
• Make reflection part of the process. Normalize asking questions and sharing imperfect results. You’re not trying to get it “right.” You’re building the muscle.
• Talk about how AI shows up in your workflow. Don’t treat it as a secret sidekick. Make its presence visible and discuss where it helps.

Leaders often ask, “How do I know if my team is ready?” My response usually sounds more like a challenge: What would it take to make your team feel safe enough to learn this in the open?

5. “How do we use AI ethically, without creating fear or mistrust?”

This is the question behind all the others. And it’s where HR has a uniquely important role to play.

Ethical AI starts with transparency: being clear about how you’re using AI, why, and what it means for employees. That includes training your leaders to answer questions about AI adoption with clarity and empathy.

It also means creating systems for review, escalation, and employee feedback. If you’re using AI to assist with performance reviews, you need human calibration, bias testing, and a way for employees to flag inaccuracies. If you’re using AI in recruiting, you need to audit regularly for fairness and accessibility.

The bigger point here is that AI won’t create or fix your culture. It will amplify what already exists. If your culture is built on fear and opacity, AI will extend that. If it’s built on trust, inclusion, and accountability, AI can support it.

What HR leaders can do now to prepare for 2026

2026 is going to be a turning point. GenAI will be more embedded in workplace tools, employees will be more AI-aware, and expectations will shift from “Should we use AI?” to “Are we using it responsibly?”

Here are six actions HR leaders can take now to stay ahead without rushing the process:

1. Audit your current tools. Identify where AI is already present in your HR tech stack; many vendors are embedding it without fanfare. Ask the hard questions about bias, transparency, and compliance.
2. Build AI literacy into onboarding and manager development. Not just for HR — across the organization. This isn’t optional knowledge anymore.
3. Define your ethical AI principles. If your company values trust, inclusion, and growth, what do those values look like in an AI-powered world? Write it down. Share it. Use it.
4. Start documenting wins and missteps. Keep a shared space for learnings across teams. When AI breaks down, make sure you capture it. These stories will shape your adoption roadmap.
5. Design for trust, not just compliance. Focus on how AI impacts relationships, clarity, and experience. Employees can feel the difference.

Final thought

Every HR leader I’ve spoken with over the past year is navigating some version of the same challenge: how to stay human in the age of systems. I don’t believe we have to choose between people and progress. I believe we can lead both.

If you’re in the early stages of AI adoption, or still unsure where to start, know this: it’s OK to move carefully. And I’m happy to help you along your learning journey! 

And take a breath. … You don’t need to have all the answers. You just need to keep asking the right questions, and bringing your team with you.

The post The 5 Questions HR Leaders Ask Me Most About AI … and My Candid Answers appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Kim Rohrer

Kim Rohrer is a veteran people leader, writer, speaker, and advisor with over 15 years of experience building human-centered cultures at high-growth companies. She is the founder of Patchwork Portfolio, author of the I Care Too Much newsletter, and co-host of the HR Confessions podcast. Today, Kim shapes the future of work through a variety of roles, drawing on her HR strategy and storytelling experience to build cultures worth talking about. Her work ranges from Employee Experience and Employer Brand to Communications and Community.

Connect with Kim on LinkedIn.

Picture this: You’re an HR leader preparing to announce a shiny new perk. Free gym memberships for everyone! A meditation app subscription! Maybe even a snack wall if the budget allows!

You hit send on the announcement email, expecting celebration. Instead, you get … crickets. Polite thank-yous, maybe. But engagement falls flat, and your retention numbers? Still not where you want them to be.

Here’s what’s happening: We keep adding perks while people are making hard choices at home about what they can afford, stretching paychecks that haven’t kept pace with rising costs. And a kombucha tap doesn’t pay for childcare.

What if the problem isn’t that we’re not offering enough, but that we’re not offering the right kind of support?

One size fits no one: a total rewards reality 

The economic reality for most workers is brutal. So when your total rewards structure includes a $150 monthly gym membership as a wellness benefit, but your employee is a single father with a 90-minute commute who desperately needs help with childcare? That benefit doesn’t just miss the mark — it highlights how disconnected the company is from his actual life, decreasing trust and tanking engagement. 

Other common mismatches:

• A fancy coffee subscription when someone is struggling to cover groceries
• A meditation app when therapy copays are the real barrier to mental health support
• A professional development budget when student loan payments are crushing them
• An on-site massage chair when they need help paying for gas to get to the office

This isn’t about employees being ungrateful. It’s about benefits that sound good on your careers page but don’t actually help people live their lives. 

And here’s the retention risk: when your benefits feel disconnected from reality, your employees feel unseen. 

The 2025 Gallup Employee Retention and Attraction Report revealed that “Pay/Benefits” is the most frequent reason that Americans are leaving their jobs. Your cash compensation practices matter, yes, but so does the rest of your total rewards strategy. Because people leave when the gap between what you offer and what they need feels too wide to ignore.

How stipends align with talent strategy and retention goals 

This is where Lifestyle Spending Accounts and flexible stipends start to make sense as a part of your overall talent strategy. You don’t have to anticipate every employee’s needs, or even know the often-personal details of their lives that necessitate using specific benefits.

When you give people a stipend, you’re saying: “We trust you to know what support looks like for you.”

Real retention requires more than just flexible benefits, though; it also depends on competitive compensation, work-life balance, career development, and company culture. What people value varies wildly from person to person, and something that seems small might make a lasting impact on someone’s life.

People might use flexible stipends for:

• Commuting costs (e.g., gas, tolls, public transit)
• Childcare or elder care support
• Mental health services not fully covered by insurance
• A home-office setup that actually makes remote work sustainable
• Paying down high-interest debt, such as student loans
• Emergency household expenses that would otherwise go on a credit card

When benefits actually address people’s real needs, they fit into the bigger picture of their holistic employee experience, building more connection to the organization and a higher likelihood of retention.

And this approach helps with recruitment too — candidates can tell the difference between perks theater and a company that’s actually thinking about real life.

What this looks like in practice: from performative perks to benefits that work

If you’re rethinking your benefits strategy with retention in mind, start by asking what people actually need.

Look at your engagement survey results. Review themes from exit interviews and stay conversations. Talk to your managers about what they’re hearing in one-on-ones. You might find that your carefully curated benefits package is solving problems people don’t have, while ignoring the ones keeping them up at night. 

Sometimes low adoption is about the offerings themselves, but often it’s about how benefits are communicated or which groups they resonate with. Maybe a particular demographic really loves one of your benefits, and you could use that story for candidate attraction efforts. Understanding your employees’ experience helps you make better decisions across your talent strategy. 

Once you’ve launched an LSA, the spending data becomes another listening tool. If your team spends stipend money on therapy, that’s a message about mental load. If they spend it on continuing education, that’s hunger for growth. If they spend it on caregiving expenses, that’s data on how your workforce is actually structured. The patterns show you where pressure is building before burnout becomes churn and give you insights into adjusting programs, forecasting needs, and supporting your workforce more proactively.

Think about how flexible stipends fit into your broader compensation philosophy. LSAs aren’t a replacement for fair pay or good health insurance — they’re a supplement that acknowledges people’s lives are different and their needs don’t fit into neat categories.

Tools like Compt make this kind of flexibility manageable. Instead of trying to administer multiple point solutions for different life stages and circumstances, you can offer real choice within a single system.

And yes, there’s ROI here. Losing good people is expensive: recruiting costs, onboarding time, lost productivity, institutional knowledge walking out the door. A flexible benefits approach that improves retention is a cost-effective investment in your talent strategy.

The real strategy: flexible benefits that support whole humans

If you’re struggling with retention, ask yourself: do your benefits match the reality your employees (and prospective employees!) are living in?

The old playbook — more perks! fancier perks! — isn’t working because it was never really about the perks. Retention happens when people feel seen, supported, and trusted. 

And don’t forget the outside world: when candidates peruse your career page, do they see benefits that reflect their needs, or a standard copy-paste job from the latest perks trends? Are you trying to hire specific demographics, or for a diverse team? Does the way you talk about benefits and perks tell that story?

Lifestyle Spending Accounts aren’t a magic bullet. But they’re a signal that you’re paying attention, that you understand your employees are whole humans with complex needs, and that you’re willing to meet them where they are. Today’s HR Leaders need to be thinking about how to create personalized, equitable, and adaptable benefits to support their organizations. LSAs make that goal attainable. 

“Talent strategy” sounds fancy. But really, it’s just about treating people like adults with different lives, different priorities, and different definitions of what “support” actually means.

If you can do that, you might find your retention numbers (and other business metrics, too!) starting to move in the right direction.

Stipends and LSAs aren’t just perks anymore: they’re a strategic part of any modern total rewards strategy. They’re easy-peasy to administer, universally helpful for employees, and designed for today’s flexible, unpredictable world of work.

The post Why Lifestyle Spending Accounts Are Actually a Talent Strategy (Not Just Another Perk) appeared first on COMPT.

Take work-life balance. In 2020, flexible work and leave surged in importance but were still viewed as pandemic responses. Half a decade later, Randstad’s Workmonitor 2025 research finds that work-life balance now outranks pay as the top job factor for 85% of employees worldwide — and for the first time, it also surpasses pay as a motivator for 79% of respondents.

That’s why here at Compt, we believe so strongly in the power of lifestyle benefits.

Countless other examples exist; I’ve watched this play out across almost a decade in the HR and benefits space. Companies don’t fall behind because they’re careless. More often, they fall behind because benefits are deceptively “set it and forget it.”

Let’s fix that with today’s guide, which details the six signs it’s time to reevaluate your employee benefits. 

What is an employee benefit plan audit?

First things first:

An employee benefit plan audit is a structured review of your benefits program to see whether it still meets your employees’ needs and your company’s broader goals. It’s essentially a health check that tells you what’s still working and what’s outdated.

This is NOT an ERISA audit.

A benefit plan audit is a strategic review of your benefits package. It’s got nothing to do with your retirement plan filings or fiduciary responsibilities under ERISA.

You’re looking at the full picture here: health plans, wellness perks, stipends, leave policies, and the everyday extras you give your employees, with the goal of understanding whether what you offer still aligns with their personal and professional priorities.

Why run one in the first place? Two reasons:

1. Your workforce evolves faster than your benefits. People get older. Some start families. Others relocate. Most face new financial pressures. Maybe they care more about professional development today than they did three years ago.
2. Falling behind (not so) quietly hurts recruiting and retention. In the 2025 release of Gallup’s annual Employee Retention and Attraction report, they revealed “Pay/Benefits” is the most common single reason Americans left their jobs in 2024.

Well, is it time for your company to run a benefit plan audit? If you tick any of the following six boxes, the answer is “Definitely.”

When to reevaluate your employee benefits program 

Nine times out of ten, your employees aren’t going to tell you outright they aren’t thrilled about their benefits package. Most people feel awkward giving that kind of feedback unless something is truly broken; I know I would.

So it’s the quiet warning signs that show up first. Look close enough and you’ll see them in your data, in broader market trends, and in the way employees actually use (or ignore) what you’re offering.

Here are some potential triggers to watch for:

Sign 1: Your survey or open enrollment feedback shows declining satisfaction.

Of all the signs your benefits program is outdated, this is the clearest.

If you send out an employee benefits survey and more than one-third of your company says they’re “dissatisfied” or “extremely dissatisfied” with their options, it’s clear as day: you need an employee benefit plan audit.

If you’ve just wrapped up open enrollment, that’s another easy place to look. See which plans people avoided and which questions kept coming up to HR. Those are the benefits categories at which you’ll want to look closely.

Pro tip: It’s best to survey your team annually; that way you can benchmark changes from one year to the next. When you make the YoY comparison, it’ll be even more obvious whether your benefits are aging out of alignment with what your employees actually care about.

Sign 2: Top talent leaves, and benefits come up in exit interviews.

When strong performers leave and they bring up benefits during exit interviews — even indirectly — you’ve got living, breathing proof your current setup is actively hurting retention.

Of course, turnover seriously disrupts team dynamics. But it’s also something that should concern your CFO; Gallup found that, on average, replacing someone in your org costs 40% to 200% of their salary, depending on their role.

If improving your benefits package could potentially turn that around, it’s certainly worth looking into.

To actively capture and record this info, create a simple tracker for every exit interview. Nothing fancy, just a table with columns like:

• Reasons for leaving (e.g., “Benefits” or “Total Comp”)
• Details (e.g., specific benefits referenced)
• What they were looking for instead
• Role/seniority
• Tenure

Sign 3: Your attrition or eNPS scores fall behind industry benchmarks.

Sign #2 is an easy tell, but employees won’t always connect the dots for you. You can’t just rely on them to mention benefits in their exit interviews or write a detailed review on Glassdoor.

Even if nobody’s vocal, facts are still facts. Right now, more than half of the workforce is watching for or actively seeking a new job, per Gallup. And further proving out the research above from Randstadt, WorldatWork reports that three-quarters of American workers say benefits matter as much as, or more than, their pay.

So if you notice voluntary turnover making a sharp increase and/or eNPS or engagement scores taking a nosedive, you’re almost definitely losing at least some of your people to competitors with better total comp packages. A benefits plan audit will tell you what you’re missing.

Sign 4: Competitors offer benefits your workforce now expects.

Take the group of employers with which you compete for the same people. (Tip: These aren’t only the companies in your exact industry.) Compare what they offer against your own package.

If they’re offering things like …

• Fertility benefits
• Elder care support
• Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs)
• Professional development opportunities
• Caregiver support or expanded parental leave

… and you’re not, reevaluating your benefits program will help you align with what’s becoming the status quo.

After your employee benefits plan audit, you can look into how much interest your team has in specific perks. Competitive benchmarks tell you what people generally expect, then your own employees will tell you whether those benefits would actually make a difference in their lives.

Sign 5: Your benefits no longer match industry benchmarks or usage patterns.

When you look at employee benefits trends and see the broader market increase funding levels in a particular place or shift their focus to certain kinds of benefits, auditing your employee benefits package tells you whether you’re keeping up.

For instance, we track and publicize usage patterns from our own users. Our 2025 Midyear Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report found 65% of Compt customers offer an all-inclusive LSA. In the annual benchmark report we released in January 2025, that figure was 55%.

A +10% jump in half a year is wild in benefits terms. If you’re offering other kinds of stipends but not an LSA yet, it’s more than enough to make you wonder, “Should we be offering the same thing?”

You might not even need to increase spend or cut/replace anything. A lot of our customers find success by consolidating benefits or reallocating funds based on how people actually use them.

Let’s say usage for a gym reimbursement is consistently low but a vocal minority absolutely loves it. That’s an ideal use case for flexible benefits like LSAs through Compt, which let you roll unlimited vendors into one benefit that works for everyone. 

Sign 6: Benefits admin is stretching your HR team thin.

It’s not only the talent market that’s changing. The software market is, too, and a benefits plan audit is just as much about how you run your program as it is about what you offer.

If you handle benefits like stipends in-house and haven’t revisited how you administer them in a while, chances are your HR team is doing a lot more manually than they need to.

And trust me on this one: If they’re hard to administer, they’re also hard to use.

Professional development is a perfect example. Almost every company offers it in some form, but most manage major components like tuition reimbursement separately from smaller ones like certifications because they feel like (and in many ways are) “different” benefits.

That makes consistent administration and taxable vs. nontaxable classification impossible. We built Professional Development Pro™ to centralize benefits and handle tax compliance, but you’d only realize you needed it in the first place if a proper reevaluation surfaced those inefficiencies.

What should an employee benefits audit include?

An employee benefits audit should walk through the hard data and employee signals, plus the operational realities of your program, so you can see exactly where your benefits align with your workforce — and where they don’t anymore.

Here’s what to include in your employee benefits audit checklist:

• Participation and usage data
• Survey results and eNPS insights
• Exit interview trends
• Competitive benchmarking
• Attrition analysis
• Stipend structure (i.e., taxable mix, cadence, funding)
• Administrative workload
• Compliance and documentation risk
• Vendor sprawl
• CFO budgeting considerations
• Opportunities for consolidation into an LSA or multicategory stipend 

How to justify a benefits refresh or budget reallocation to your CFO

We’re people leaders too, so we get it. But your CFO probably cares about cost feasibility more than warm-and-fuzzy people outcomes, so you have to translate HR needs into financial ones.

Build a better benefits package with Compt.

Sometimes reevaluating your benefits package means adding benefits your people now expect. Other times, it means reallocating dollars from low-use perks. And often it means fixing the operational mess behind the scenes so your HR team can actually run the program efficiently.

Compt helps you do it all.

With flexible LSAs and multicategory stipends, you can easily introduce new benefits without managing dozens of vendors. And most importantly, you can give employees more choice (to the tune of 28 flexible benefits categories and counting) without drowning HR in approvals or reimbursement requests.

Ready to see for yourself? Request a demo to chat (no pressure!) with a benefits expert.

The post When to Reevaluate Your Employee Benefits: 6 Signs Your Program Needs a Refresh appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Kim Rohrer

Kim Rohrer is a veteran people leader, writer, speaker, and advisor with over 15 years of experience building human-centered cultures at high-growth companies. She is the founder of Patchwork Portfolio, author of the I Care Too Much newsletter, and co-host of the HR Confessions podcast. Today, Kim shapes the future of work through a variety of roles, drawing on her HR strategy and storytelling experience to build cultures worth talking about. Her work ranges from Employee Experience and Employer Brand to Communications and Community.

Connect with Kim on LinkedIn.

Every year, HR teams everywhere enter the same spiral: Which holidays do we give time off for? What do we call the December company party? And of course — how do we show appreciation in a way that will actually make people feel valued?

I’ve been there. Working as a People Leader at companies with employees all over the world, I watched well-meaning leaders struggle with the same questions year after year about whose holidays get acknowledged and how to celebrate our teams.

Spoiler alert: there is no perfect one-size-fits-all solution, no matter how many vendor demos promise you there is. And your good intentions only go so far when someone feels invisible or misunderstood.

So let’s talk about which inclusive holiday benefits actually work when you’re trying to give back to your team without leaving people out.

Not everyone celebrates the same way (and that’s the point).

We’ve all experienced that fun time at work where “the holidays” is really just corporate shorthand for “Christmas … oh, um, but also Hanukkah and I guess Kwanzaa and maybe the Winter Solstice too? Here’s our office Winter Celebrations Tree and some candy canes? Secret Santa is inclusive, right?” Awkwaaarrrrrrrd.

Many companies moved past calling it the “Christmas party” years ago, but even “holiday party” dances around the reality: people celebrate different things, at different times, in wildly different ways. 

Some of your employees are fasting during Ramadan or Yom Kippur while meeting deadlines. Others don’t observe any religious holidays, but still like to celebrate the season. Some people want shiny company-branded swag, and others like to end the year holed up in a snow-covered cabin with no technology. 

The point is, plenty of folks have traditions they want to celebrate this time of year — they just don’t want you to assume what that celebration looks like.

It’s nearly impossible to design one holiday experience that reflects the reality of your entire team’s lived experiences — and you should stop trying, like, now. There is a better way!

This is where Lifestyle Spending Accounts start to make sense as an inclusion strategy, not just a benefits offering. When you give people a stipend they can use however they want, you’re not just giving them flexibility; you’re acknowledging the diverse spectrum of needs (and that you don’t know what they all are) and demonstrating that you trust them to make their own choices.

That might mean:

• Buying ingredients for a special family meal
• Covering travel costs to visit loved ones
• Purchasing gifts that align with their traditions
• Supporting a cause they care about through donations
• Using it for something completely unrelated to any holiday at all

And bonus: Compt’s Midyear Benchmark Report found that 70% of stipend spending goes to local and independent vendors rather than big-box retailers — hell yes to keeping those dollars in your local community, where they actually matter!

The point isn’t to celebrate everything. It’s to stop pretending there’s one right way to celebrate anything.

The great swag waste problem affects us all.

Let’s be honest: most company swag is expensive garbage.

Boxes of logo’d hoodies in the wrong sizes, sitting in storage until the company rebrands. Employees who already have four water bottles and zero interest in a fifth. Gift boxes filled with artisanal candles that smell like “forest floor” or whatever, shipped in packaging that could survive a nuclear blast, destined to sit unopened in a closet, waiting for the next white elephant gift swap.

And we do this every holiday season, convincing ourselves that this year’s holiday swag will be different. It’s not.

Not everyone wants to splurge on something for themselves, either. While some employees will definitely enjoy a free massage or a special excursion on an upcoming vacation, some would rather make a donation to a cause they care about during end-of-year giving season. Others might use it to cover groceries or household essentials when finances are stretched thin. 

But maybe someone does want that hoodie with the new company logo. Great! Let them choose it from your swag store so you don’t have to trek to every GAP within commuting distance to track down those cool hoodies in everyone’s sizes that they are sold out of online, so that you can send them to the local embroidery shop in time for the holiday party. (Been there.) 

Rather than giving everyone another mug that will end up at Goodwill because they’re still using last year’s mug as a pen holder on their desk and they don’t need another damn mug … let folks use a company gift platform to buy something for a family member when money is tight. (Done that.)

That flexibility matters.

Besides, when you default to one-size-fits-all gifts, you’re not just wasting money; you’re contributing to overproduction, excess shipping, and literal trash. The environmental impact alone should make us rethink the model. If your office swag closet (or apartment, increasingly common in our remote-work environment) is full of unwanted leftovers, you know what I mean.

The gift isn’t the hoodie or the expensive whiskey. The gift is respecting that people have different values and priorities.

Stop managing holiday chaos point by point.

Even if you’ve moved past bulk swag orders, there’s still the vendor management nightmare.

You research gift platforms. Schedule demos. Negotiate pricing. Sign the contract. Send the announcement. Next year (or even sooner), you’re doing it all over again because the last vendor didn’t have enough options, or the interface was clunky, or people just didn’t use it.

And every platform has the same rotation of meal kits, candles, and succulents. It’s like they’re all pulling from the same catalog of things people are too polite to say they don’t want. 🤭

Managing point solutions for every occasion — birthdays, work anniversaries, holidays, life events — is exhausting. You’re juggling logins, budgets, approval workflows, and reporting across multiple platforms, all for “personalization” that isn’t actually personal. And time is money, right? Your time is valuable. Don’t waste it on administrative nonsense that doesn’t make an impact. 

Meanwhile, your employees are drowning in accounts they never asked for, trying to remember which platform has their points, which one expires, and whether this quarter’s wellness credit can be used for that thing they want or if they need to wait for next quarter’s stipend. Only 28% of employees surveyed by benefits broker NFP report making maximum use of perks and benefits because of “the misfit of benefits offered versus what is valued.”

Blegh.

It’s a lot of effort for a system that fundamentally misses the point: people just want choice. Compt’s case study with Quickbase blew my mind (processing benefits now takes 90 minutes instead of literal days!), and — hot off the presses — their new case study with TEN7 says it only takes 5-10 minutes a month to administer!

Wish Compt had been around when I was having “help me organize my swag closet” body doubling sessions and hosting “swag trade” happy hours to help get rid of overstock!

The real gift? Feeling seen.

Holiday planning doesn’t have to be this hard. You don’t need the perfect gift, the perfect vendor, or the perfect way to acknowledge every celebration on the calendar.

You just need to treat your employees like adults — adults who know what they value, what they celebrate, and what would actually make them feel appreciated.

That’s what inclusive holiday benefits (and inclusion in general) actually look like in practice. Not a carefully curated gift box. Not a generic “Happy Holidays” email. Just respect, flexibility, and trust. 

Imagine that.

P.S. I wouldn’t write for Compt if I didn’t love the team and believe in the product. Book a no-pressure demo today and see what the fuss is about! 

The post How to Support Every Employee With Inclusive Holiday Benefits appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Sarah Deane

Sarah Deane is a researcher, author, and founder advancing the science of human energy and performance. As CEO of MEvolution, she develops evidence-based systems that combine behavioral and cognitive science with artificial intelligence to help individuals and organizations measure, master, and sustain peak human capacity.

A former HP global leader in employee workplace experience, Sarah holds a Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and teaches at Stanford University Continuing Studies. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Thrive Global, Reworked, and SHRM, and she regularly speaks at conferences including SXSW, HRWest, and Gartner.

Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn.

Ask any CEO what their priorities are, and you’ll hear one item again and again: adoption of AI. It’s on their mandates, it’s on their hiring plans, it’s on their strategy decks. Companies like Zapier now require AI fluency as a part of their hiring process. Gartner says 80% of enterprises plan to integrate AI into operations within the year. McKinsey projects up to $4.4 trillion in annual economic value. And Stanford University reports adoption jumped from 55% in 2023 to 78% in 2024.

It’s pretty clear: AI isn’t a side experiment anymore. It’s here. It’s scaling fast. It’s already changing how we work and lead. And … the benefits are real. Forty percent of U.S. employees now use AI at work, nearly double from just two years ago. One in four use it weekly. One in ten use it daily. Research from Stanford, George Mason, and Clemson Universities found “workers using AI report a three-fold productivity gains on many tasks” — as much as an extra hour back per task!

But here’s the truth: productivity, engagement, resilience — the KPIs we usually rely on to measure success — only tell part of the story. 

Productivity can measure output. Engagement can measure how people feel. Resilience can measure how quickly they recover from challenges. But …

They all run on one thing: energy

Human Energy is the foundational KPI — the core resource that fuels and influences every other human measure. More energy means more capacity to do higher quality work, to build deeper emotional connection, and to maintain perspective under pressure. When energy is depleted, we slip into autopilot, go through the motions, disengage, and lose the ability to bring our best contributions forward. It’s that drained feeling after four back-to-back meetings — or the exhaustion that hits when you are juggling family demands alongside the tasks that seemed to have crept into your job description over the last year.

In fact, research shows that people who are positively energized outperform in performance and profitability by a factor of four or more. In other words, more energy doesn’t just make us feel better — it makes us more effective humans.

So yes, it’s fair to say that AI is already delivering fantastic efficiency gains in many ways. And that it’s just getting started with what it can do for our work and personal lives. 

But if companies fail to measure and manage Human Energy, they’re missing the most critical KPI for sustainable transformation.

And after twenty years studying AI and human behavior, here’s what I’ve seen: AI can accelerate progress like nothing else — but it also creates blind spots, unintended consequences, and challenges that can be easily lost in the hype. 

AI without human depth = AI development and deployment that ignores the very human sciences it depends on

When I completed my master’s with a focus in artificial intelligence, nearly twenty years ago, AI wasn’t just about being able to “code an algorithm.” Along with modules in data and algorithms and computer vision, we also had the opportunity to study modules in contract law, criminal law, psychology, theory of evolution, and behavioral science. Why? Because AI doesn’t exist in isolation. It exists inside human systems. That means every decision in design or deployment connects back to humans. If technology fails in the moment, a human steps in. Who selected the datasets to train the model? A human. Who presents an AI-generated sales report in a way that motivates and engages stakeholders? A human. Who brings a presence or energy that resonates — something that doesn’t feel generic, flat, or repetitive? A human.

Fast forward to today, and AI progress has exploded. Certifications and quick courses enable anyone to start building AI tools in hours. While it’s certainly exciting to tap into all that creativity, innovation, and speed, if you are building tools designed to replicate certain functions of human intelligence, starting with a true understanding of humans is a significant part! That broader context isn’t optional — it’s what makes AI trustworthy, useful, and safe. Without it, unintended consequences happen that will cost in more ways than one.

AI without human wisdom = transformation theater

Too many companies are pouring billions into AI tools and not seeing the results they intended. Why? Because the decisions driving adoption are often made at the extremes. The knee-jerk question becomes: “How many people can we cut because AI can do this task?” That’s not a strategy. It ignores the uniquely human skills and wisdom that make work effective in the first place — the judgment, nuance, and contextual awareness that AI cannot replicate. Strip those away, and you don’t get transformation, you get theater: shiny dashboards masking shallow impact. 

It’s not just about whether AI can complete a task; it’s about how that task fits into the broader ecosystem of people, behaviors, and connection points so the value and return are fully realized. 

Worse, these reactive cuts trigger ripple effects across the ecosystem, disrupting quality, culture, and customer trust. Short-term savings are quickly overshadowed by long-term costs: burnout, rework, disengagement, and declining innovation.

The result: a negative energy loop, that drains the very energy needed to make AI’s great promise achievable.

AI without focused human energy = exhaustion

Every new tool promises to save time — but each one also adds context switching, decision fatigue, and cognitive overload. Multiply that by the speed of AI adoption, and suddenly the thing that was meant to energize us is draining us. 

Yes, AI, when used mindfully, can free up hours, act as a learning partner, and spark creativity. But it also creates AI fatigue and even AI anxiety — the endless scramble to keep up, the mental toll of constant pivots, the fear of job loss to AI, and even the weariness of hearing the word “AI” yet again. 

Every switch, every choice, every interaction carries an energy cost. So without understanding, measuring, and managing human energy, AI can accelerate exhaustion instead of bringing performance gains.

The truth about human capacity

You see, AI’s real potential doesn’t lie in the algorithms, datasets, and generative capabilities alone. 

It lies in us. 

AI is not here to replace our humanity, but to create more space for it to shine.

The most advanced AI still can’t truly do what humans can: genuinely feel and have its own values-based judgment, connection, or ecosystem thinking. But these high-functioning capacities aren’t free. They run on one finite resource: energy.

Think about it this way: We often view listening as a single behavior, but beneath the surface, it’s a complex sequence of mental transactions, each carrying its own energy cost. Everything we do, from making a choice to maintaining perspective to fighting off a common cold, draws from our energy pool. Now, multiply that across every interaction, every decision, every moment in an organization, and you start to see why human energy is the foundational element to individual and business success. 

Case in point: burnout, which is a state of energy deficit. Leaders spend millions training people in “behaviors,but if employees don’t have the energy reserves to fund those behaviors, nothing sticks. 

This is why I know Human Energy must become the next critical KPI.

Energy: The new metric for success 

Seven years ago, my team and I set out to understand what it truly takes to thrive with sustainable performance.  What we discovered was that those who thrive have energy reserves (i.e., they operate in an energy-rich state, mentally “cash flow positive”). 

It is energy that determines whether employees actually have the capacity to absorb and apply transformation initiatives. 

It is energy that predicts the quality of uniquely human contributions that AI alone cannot provide. 

It is energy that connects individual capacity to organizational performance and engagement, bridging the gap between personal resilience and enterprise outcomes. 

And ever since our big discovery, we’ve been hyperfocused on how to set out to measure, and master, human energy.  Here’s what we’ve learned on this journey:

• No one is measuring Human Energy right now, which means leaders are often flying “blind” and setting strategies and goals without a clear sense of whether their people had the capacity to achieve them. The result? Employees either burn out trying to meet the expectations — or goals go unmet. This led us to create the Energy Management Quotient (EMQ) evaluation, which maps an individual’s mind to reveal the state of their “human energy bank” and identifies opportunities to increase and optimize it. We included more than 1,200 points of analysis, so it delivers the depth of insight equivalent to multiple expert sessions — in just one assessment.
• Often, assessments alone aren’t enough — people don’t know what to do with the insights. That’s why we built personalized roadmaps that guide individuals through their own “brain libraries” and layered toolkits that let them engage at the right level, supporting the journey from awareness to mastery.
• Even a single 90-minute energy awareness session creates measurable impact 30 days later — 75% report reduced burnout risk, 94% feel more hopeful and positive, 75% feel better able to manage life and work, and 81% actively apply at least one technique learned.
• Gaining this level of insight and development has traditionally required high-touch, high-cost programs, forcing organizations into the difficult dilemma of who gets access — and leaving much potential untapped. We solved this by combining algorithms with human oversight to deliver insights that truly resonate with each person at scale. Even without a human facilitator, the analysis can land in a way employees can understand, connect with, and act on.
• Many investments deliver only temporary gains. Look at the last decade: stress has risen, engagement hit a 10-year low in 2024, and thriving is in decline. Energy management offers a strategy for lasting impact. Longitudinal studies show that even a three-month program can deliver lasting results, such as measurable improvements in focus, resilience, and performance that persist two years, and even six years, later.

Because AI only reaches its potential when the right humans build, use, and guide it. It has extraordinary possibilities. But let’s be clear: AI will only ever be as powerful as the humans behind it. And humans will only ever be as powerful as their energy reserves.

The post Why Human Energy Is the Next Billion-Dollar KPI in the AI Era (and What 20 Years in AI & Human Performance Taught Me About Measuring It) appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Nick Lush

Nick Lush is the Director of Learning & Development at BeatBox, where they build people-first programs that scale with heart. With five years of experience in L&D and people development, Nick is known for designing impactful, human-centered learning strategies that solve for the business and employee growth at every level. They’ve worked with organizations like Tandem, Included Health, and Hunt Club, and they’re sharing insights on what it’s been like to build resilient, empowered, and engaged teams.

Connect with Nick on LinkedIn.

At the end of August 2025, I started an online Master of Science program in HR Management via Texas Tech University, courtesy of BeatBox Beverages’ tuition reimbursement program. I have found the return to school to be simultaneously energizing, exciting, interesting, and, frankly, a bit frustrating. I thought it could be fun to keep a running online diary of the experience. When I was an undergraduate, I had a Xanga site (look it up if you’re too young). Now that I’ve been a working professional, I’m writing my blog posts for a corporate partner. The more things change, the more they stay the same! 

It’s been roughly 17 years since I was last in school. With the exception of earning microlearning certificates from Coursera, Udemy, and EdX, I’ve never taken a full course that was primarily online before this experience. I’m about halfway into my first semester and I’m enjoying it, but it’s also opened my eyes to a few interesting things. Let’s talk about them! 

Going “back” to college is a different vibe when it’s just going back to your desk.

As the semester approached, I got lots of questions from people around me about how I was feeling. To be honest, I struggled with how to answer; I was excited, but I also knew there wasn’t going to be as much of a formal point of departure. It’s a different feeling to start a new degree program from the same desk at which you do your work, without your parents tearfully driving off into the distance after helping you move into the dorms. 

Gathering my undergraduate transcripts was also a great reminder that while I didn’t think of myself as a “great” student during that time — and I wasn’t when it came to general ed — in the coursework I cared about, I actually did really well. That built up my confidence that I would be up to the task of stepping into a program that was entirely built around a subject I cared about, both personally and professionally.

I work with a primarily remote team at BeatBox. One of the productivity tips we give our teams is that having a dedicated office space at home where their brain can shift into “work” mode. That also makes it easier to, after work, shift out of it by not bringing their laptop with them to the couch or the bedroom.

Now that I’m in school, I find myself needing to create an extra space to create the same mental break, both physically and in my schedule. When I’m at my desk, it can be too easy to be pulled into the regular working rhythms of checking Slack and email. As a result, I try to accomplish my schoolwork from my personal computer at my kitchen counter or dining table to establish a dedicated space that doesn’t cross over too much into either my personal or working life. So far, so good! 

Just because you build a tuition reimbursement program doesn’t mean they’ll come all on their own.

Selfishly, one of the reasons I started working on creating a tuition reimbursement program at BeatBox is that I was already thinking about pursuing a master’s program, but needed the extra financial help to put it within reach. I assumed there might be others in the org feeling the same who would also benefit, so I took on the legwork of learning just enough tax code to get it done. 

The results, so far, have been mixed. The program was greeted with enthusiasm, but we’ve only had one other student return to school on a regular basis, with a couple of others taking the opportunity to pursue individual classes or certifications. In a rapidly scaling organization, it has turned out to be a great lesson for me in the importance of building marketing skills as an HR professional. 

It’s not enough to build a great benefits package or some cool programs. You have to also make sure people know about them and how to take advantage. And that can often involve a lot of repetitive work. I encourage anyone going down this same road, or building a learning or lifestyle stipend in Compt, to invest equal energy in building out your communications plan to make sure your message is regular, multimodal, and clear. It may feel repetitive, but you’d be surprised how many people missed the first (or fifth) message.

New perspectives bring new clarity.

I chose the program that I did for two primary reasons. First, I am a big proponent of finding contact information for professors and staff in any department that you are seriously considering for a degree program and sending them an email to say hello and ask questions. Both in my undergraduate work at the University of Kansas and now in my master’s through Texas Tech, the responses from faculty were a huge selling point. The staff at TTU were immediately warm, responsive, and engaging. 

Especially in a virtual environment, I wanted to make sure my experience was going to be engaging and meaningful and not just me working by myself on my laptop with minimal interaction. To bring campus a little closer to me, I’ve also bought Red Raider gear and office decor, and on game days I always eat something with a tortilla because I can’t be there to throw ‘em. 

The second reason was that of the online HR programs I looked at in my price range, TTU’s was the only one housed in a school of business. Human resource development in academia tends to be viewed as more closely related to education and is thus often housed within that school, but I wanted to keep my focus on business settings. 

As a result, most of my classmates in my first course are actually MBA students, many of whom continued directly on from their undergraduate work. It has been an interesting perspective shift to be in a course centered on organizational behavior and design with so many young professionals and students as well as with so many classmates from different walks of life. My classmates who are veterans have excellent insights to share on organizational dynamics from a military standpoint. My younger peers provide an interesting perspective into how the career ladder and leadership are viewed from a generation just getting started in the office. 

We share thoughts and ideas in our message boards, while I also go through my textbooks. Between these two learning methods, I see much of the work that I’m doing day to day as a learning and development professional in a new light because I’m able to pair theory and academic grounding with activities we’re pursuing at BeatBox and evaluate their efficacy in new ways.

So far, the experience has been fulfilling and has energized me about further academic work in a way that I wasn’t expecting. I’m thankful to be in an environment at BeatBox where learning and professional development are valued and where I am granted the time (and a little extra cash) to invest in meaningful education for myself. 

I’m excited to see where the journey goes from here and what I’m able to bring back to my team. 

The post Grad School Diaries: The Power of Employer-Sponsored Tuition Reimbursement appeared first on COMPT.