Your group benefits plan is your employee experience

Lucy Van Scheltinga learned early on that a great employee experience doesn’t rest on onboarding or culture or workspace design alone. She quickly saw that much of an employee’s satisfaction comes down to what support their employer offers and how easily they can reach it.

“Employee experience isn't something that happens after you've designed the benefits plan,” says the director of Health, Westland Benefits, Eastern Canada. “The plan is a huge part of the experience itself.”

With 18 years in group benefits, most spent working directly with plan sponsors and leading sales teams through significant growth, Van Scheltinga brings a particular kind of clarity to conversations about what a benefits program is actually for.

That perspective took root early. Van Scheltinga started out on the casualty claims side, working alongside insurance partners and watching coverage play out in real time for real people, and the lessons she learned there stuck. That understanding has framed Van Scheltinga’s approach to her work ever since.

“When you've sat with claims, you understand a benefits plan is more than a spreadsheet,” she says. “It's what happens to someone's life when things go sideways.”

When professional and personal converge

Van Scheltinga’s thoughts around the value of benefits continue to evolve, with her attention most recently caught by an issue that sits close to home: the gap in menopause-related coverage. Van Scheltinga, who has written on this subject extensively, says the story the data tells is too compelling to ignore in the benefits space.

More than two million Canadian women move through perimenopause in any given year, with a significant share reporting that symptoms affect their performance at work. Yet only a small fraction say their employer's plan provided the support they needed. Laid out in black and white, the numbers “crystallize something I’ve been circling for years,” Van Scheltinga says.

Over time, benefit plans course-corrected to encompass mental health and family planning, while embracing more flexibility. But, as the statistics illustrate, there’s a whole life stage that affects some of an organization’s most experienced people — and it’s barely on the radar.

“Once you see a gap like that, you can’t unsee it,” Van Scheltinga notes, adding that once again, she looked beyond the data on the page. But this time, it was personal.

“I've gone through this transition myself, and I've watched several of my female coworkers go through it at the same time, often quietly and often while still showing up and performing at a high level. Apart from the symptoms, what struck me most was how many of us struggled to be heard when we brought it up with our own doctors.”

If women are bringing disruptive symptoms to health care professionals only to have them minimized or dismissed, it’s no surprise that menopause coverage is invisible in benefits plans as well. This issue deserves a real spotlight, Van Scheltinga argues.

“Women going through perimenopause need advocacy, in the exam room and in how their employer designs support around them,” she says. “They don’t need just another line item stuck into a plan booklet.”

While this gap is a coverage issue, it also indicates something bigger. It highlights who benefits plans have historically been designed around, and who’s been left out. There are other similar chasms that Westland works hard to bridge. For example, Van Scheltinga’s colleague Tim Mackie, EVP of Distribution at Westland, makes a parallel case for men’s mental health, arguing that most plans still don’t adequately support it.

Both positions point to the same reality: generic, broad-brush benefits don’t work anymore. Truly effective plan design, Van Scheltinga notes, must be built around specific population needs rather than broad category coverage.

From premium to people: an industry-wide shift

Van Scheltinga credits her role on Westland Benefits' leadership team for giving her the platform to push her way of thinking further. Her work, she explains, doesn’t stop with placing a policy; it’s more comprehensive. It calls for solving genuinely complex benefit challenges, or to put it plainly, “determining what a workforce actually needs and whether the plan in front of them delivers it.”

This approach is mirrored across the wider Canadian market. In Benefits Canada's 2026 Group Benefits Providers Report, plan sponsors at companies like 1Password and Sobeys describe employees expecting the same instant, self-serve experience from their benefits that they get everywhere else online, while also expecting their personal health data to be protected.

She’s witnessing a similar shift at the employer level. At renewal meetings, employers would walk in with one thing on their mind: premium. Now, the conversation often starts somewhere different. How do people access it? Is it mobile? Simple? Does it integrate with the tools they already use?

Employers should be less concerned about choosing the wrong health and wellbeing platform from the plethora of options and more focused on having a clear problem to solve before adding one. Specificity also makes the internal budget case easier to build as it’s much harder for a leadership team to say no to a program tied to a measurable, named problem than to a general aspiration.

“The question I ask clients is always the same,” Van Scheltinga notes. “What specific gap are we closing? Not ‘we should offer a wellness app’ but ‘our data shows a real gap in menopause-related coverage.’”

When it comes to ROI, while utilization is the first signal, Van Scheltinga stresses it’s not the only one. If nobody’s using an offering, that’s a real problem, but high usage of something low impact doesn’t make it a success either. She looks for movement in metrics the employer already tracks, such as absenteeism, short-term disability claims, retention in a specific role or region, or engagement survey results. Programs that just check a box may get renewed because nobody wants to be the one who cuts the mental health benefit, she explains, but programs delivering real value get expanded because the data makes the case on its own.

Employers need a few non-negotiables, such as a platform that fits into an employee's existing routine rather than asking them to seek it out once a year and data collection that plan sponsors can act on, all underpinned by more robust communication between all stakeholders.

“That's how we work with our own clients: we don't disappear between renewals, we stay in constant communication throughout the year,” she explains. “When a workforce's needs shift — whether that's a gap in coverage we're seeing in the data or a new life stage affecting a specific group of employees — we're already in the conversation instead of waiting twelve months to raise it.”

‘Freeing, not threatening’

Van Scheltinga calls the rise of AI and automation freeing, not threatening. If the administration side is handled by technology, then advisors have more bandwidth for what actually requires judgment.

That’s the mission for Van Scheltinga and Westland Benefits: interpreting what plan data means for a specific workforce and being present for the harder conversations. That’s the job, Van Scheltinga says, being the person in the room when someone needs an advocate.

“Every touchpoint with a client is a chance to ask whether what they’re offering still matches how their people live, not just what was competitive a few years ago.”