August 26, 2026
45 minutes
Raising the bar without raising your risk: how benefit leaders disrupt without regret
Key takeaways
- Learn the real signals that tell you a solution is no longer earning its place, and how to weigh employee sentiment against ROI, engagement, and cost.
- Go inside an actual rip-and-replace: what triggers the call to move on, and what happens backstage that employees never see.
- Understand how to tell people a benefit they liked is going away without it feeling like something is being taken from them.
- Hear what Candace wishes she had known before her first transition, and how to stop delaying a change you already know you need to make.
Every benefits leader knows how to launch a new solution. Far fewer talk openly about the other side of the job: what to do when a benefit stops earning its place. Sometimes employees still like it but the ROI has thinned. Sometimes engagement can no longer justify the cost, or a once-strong partner no longer fits the strategy.
In this candid panel, Candace Jodice, who led a $3B+ annual benefits budget across 300,000+ employees at CVS Health, joins moderator Jeannette Abbott to walk through a real rip-and-replace from the inside: the signals that trigger the decision, the work employees never see, and how to sequence a transition so the story becomes "here's what you're getting."
If you already know a partner needs to go but keep putting it off, this is the conversation worth 45 minutes of your week.
Hosts
Meet your hosts
Candace Jodice spent over two decades leading benefits at CVS Health, including a budget north of $3 billion and eight post-merger transitions. In this session she sits down with Jeannette Abbott to talk through what actually goes into cutting a benefit loose, from spotting the moment a solution stops pulling its weight to managing the fallout with employees who still liked it. Expect real examples, real mistakes, and a clear-eyed look at what she'd do differently if she were making the call today.
