Overalls CEO shares his 2025 profit predictions

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‘Tis the season for predictions, and employee benefits CEO predicts more employee readiness to meet challenges, cost-shifting healthcare benefits and more hybrid work in 2025, based on what his tech sector clients are , professional services, healthcare and manufacturing. telling him.

Companies that rely on AI “copilots” to assist their employees will need to plan for ongoing retraining of those employees to adapt to accelerating AI capabilities, says Jon Cooper, chief executive of Overalls, a benefits provider for employees providing concierge assistance with non-work duties.

“Employees who are retrained now will have to be retrained in a year because the tools will have evolved to become even more sophisticated,” he says. “Departments responsible for educating and training employees, this will be a major focus for 2025 for a lot of companies: investing in their educational capabilities.”

In the healthcare benefits space, Cooper predicts that companies in 2025 will take drastic steps to reduce their costs, driven in part by the 2024 increases in healthcare plan renewal rates that many of his clients have reported, Cooper says.

“There’s been an increasing shift to put more and more of the cost on employees,” he says. He expects more companies to choose individually covered health reimbursement arrangements (ICHRAs), where employees buy health insurance and companies reimburse them for some or all of their premiums, or referral-based pricing where the company pays a set price per healthcare procedure and the employee pays the difference if the actual cost is higher.

Companies may also bundle cheaper, high-deductible health care plans with other insurance that pays out only under specific circumstances, such as accident or cancer policies, which will create more burdens for employees, Cooper says.

“It’s incredibly complicated for individuals to navigate,” he says. “We see this a lot in our business; when people have this combination of products, they come to us and say, “Hey, I don’t know how to do this.”

“It’s a big responsibility to navigate a very complex situation for consumers who, in many cases, are already dealing with an accident or a family member who is sick,” says Cooper.

Instead of blanket health benefits like company-wide gym memberships, more employers are offering individual benefit budgets for employees to choose their own solution, he says. Some employees might choose a gym, while others might budget for fertility treatment, for example.

More companies in 2025 will also extend employee benefits that address issues in employees’ lives earlier, with the intention of avoiding lost time from work and more costly interventions later, Cooper says. A survey conducted by Overall in 2022 found that 83% of the 1,350 employees surveyed lost work time “due to the stresses of life” and 43% took two weeks off work to deal with a problem.

“Businesses are trying to go upstream earlier and say, ‘What is that underlying problem that is causing the stress; Can we address that?'” he says. “From a mental health perspective, it’s not just looking at treating symptoms with therapy, but trying to prevent problems from reaching that tipping point in the first place.”

More of his clients are starting to incorporate an employee benefits element into their disaster and business continuity planning, especially in the wake of catastrophic wildfires, floods and hurricanes in 2024, Cooper says. Companies have set up emergency assistance funds set aside to help employees return to work if their home is flooded or burned down, for example.

“More and more HR departments need to spend time thinking about: How do we respond and help our employees in these situations?” he says. “As the frequency of these increases due to climate change, the impact on business becomes greater.”

About half of Overall’s clients are technology or professional services companies, and Cooper says he sees signs of a rebound in tech hiring in 2025 as companies lift hiring freezes and raise more capital again, and as merger activity picks up and procurement is growing in the sector. This will lead to a shift back to more hybrid working arrangements, he predicts.

“The first thing they’re recruiting for — and the way they’re trying to lure people away from Google and Amazon — is that they offer completely flexible work,” he says. “As the market demands talent and people start hiring again, it’s going to be a little harder to be so confined to going back to the office five days a week.”

Greater liquidity and competition for talent will also lead to higher spending on employee benefits by tech companies in particular, Cooper says.

“Companies are starting to say, ‘OK, there’s a way to raise more capital, a way to get out. Therefore, we can start spending more,” he says.