Notes from our expert team.

HR leaders are under pressure to put AI to work, and employees are already asking chatbots about their benefits. This guide is for HR and benefits teams at mid-market companies who need practical guardrails for using ChatGPT, Claude, and other general AI tools on benefits questions. It explains when these tools are a good fit and when a benefits-specific tool like HQ is the safer choice, because benefits answers are personal, involve protected health information, and often come up at high-stakes moments.

Religious accommodation and religious inclusion are not the same thing, though most companies treat them that way. Meeting the legal minimum keeps you compliant, but employees are still managing how much of their faith they show at work, and that gap shows up in engagement and retention long before it shows up in a compliance audit. This piece argues that real inclusion comes from the everyday design choices most HR teams overlook: how holidays get built into the benefits calendar, how managers respond when someone raises a request, and how comfortable people feel asking in the first place.

Healthcare costs are rising, and traditional group plans no longer fit today’s distributed workforce. This blog breaks down what an Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA) is, how it works, and the key differences between ICHRAs and QSEHRAs. Drawing on insights from the recent Nava + Thatch webinar, it explores the pros and cons of this modern benefits model and how it helps employers control costs while giving employees real choice.

Open enrollment is one of HR's busiest, highest-stakes stretches, and how smoothly it goes often comes down to what your broker's actually doing behind the scenes, not just the plan you signed at renewal. A good broker sets up and tests the enrollment platform, drafts or reviews employee communications, supports employee education, coordinates compliance notices like COBRA and ACA disclosures, and audits enrollment data once OE closes. Since employees spend very little time choosing a plan, that support directly shapes whether they end up in the right coverage. A few weeks before OE opens, ask your broker to walk you through their plan for each of these pieces so you know what to expect.

AI is starting to take over the busywork of benefits compliance: tracking ACA and COBRA deadlines, catching enrollment data errors, and flagging outdated plan language. It can't take over the judgment calls, and with ACA penalties rising again in 2026, those calls still carry real financial risk. HR leaders considering AI compliance tools should start with one task, keep a person reviewing the output, and expand only once the tool proves it can be trusted. That's the same principle behind Nava HQ: AI does the watching, but a dedicated advisor still owns the outcome.

Before you evaluate a single renewal option, get clear on what you're optimizing for. There are six priorities at play in every renewal decision: costs, benefits quality, bandwidth, employee satisfaction, employee disruption, and risk tolerance: Knowing where you stand on each one changes everything. HR leaders who know their priorities in advance make faster, better decisions when the pressure hits.

Renewal season turns into a defensive scramble when leadership only sees the number after it's already final. Bringing your CFO in months earlier, and translating claims trends and funding risk into language finance already uses, changes that same number from a surprise into a decision people helped shape. Self-funding isn't the riskier option: walking into a renewal with no claims data and no shared read on risk tolerance is. A fixed premium doesn't remove that risk, it just hides where it shows up. A simple exercise, ranking cost, benefits quality, team bandwidth, employee satisfaction, disruption tolerance, and risk tolerance against both a mild and severe renewal scenario, shows an organization exactly where its real flexibility sits before the number ever arrives.

Fully insured employers often assume they have no leverage at renewal, since they can't see claims data the way self-funded groups can. That assumption is costing them money. Carriers will share medical loss ratio even with small, fully insured groups, and that number is often enough to show whether a renewal increase actually holds up. One fully insured group used a 54-57% loss ratio, well under the carrier's target, to turn a proposed 10% increase into a rate pass. The real barrier for fully insured employers isn't a lack of leverage, it's not knowing what to ask for.

Most self-funded employers are paying more for prescription drugs than they realize, not because drug prices are opaque (though they are), but because the companies managing their pharmacy benefits are built on compensation models that aren't required to be disclosed. That's changing. New federal rules are putting pressure on pharmacy benefit managers to show their work, and employers who understand what to ask for are in a much stronger position at renewal than those who don't.

This blog breaks down the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and state paid family and medical leave (PFML) programs so HR leaders can understand who’s covered, how long employees can take leave, and which rules apply in each state. You’ll find a complete A–Z guide to state laws, including leave durations, wage replacement details, and special provisions that go beyond the federal baseline. It also includes practical compliance tips to help employers manage leave consistently, avoid costly mistakes, and support employees during life’s most important moments.

Employee benefits brokers are typically paid through carrier commissions or flat fees, and federal law now requires them to disclose that compensation to you. This guide breaks down how broker pay works, what a complete CAA disclosure should include, and how to use that information to evaluate your broker at renewal.

Most companies benchmark their benefits once a year, buried inside a renewal conversation. This post argues that's too late. A renewal tells you what your benefits will cost; benchmarking tells you whether that cost is buying competitive value — and those are two very different questions. Using free public data sources like KFF, BLS, SHRM, and IFEBP, HR teams can compare their health plans, contributions, leave policies, and emerging benefits against peer companies by industry, region, and size. The post walks through a five-step process for doing that analysis, introduces Nava HQ as a tool that makes live benchmarking data accessible without waiting for a broker, and closes with a framework for translating findings into three types of action: plan redesign, carrier negotiation, or budget reallocation.