From Fitness to Financial Planning: What Employees Prioritize in Their Benefits, an Industry Breakdown

The third in a four-part Signals by Evive series exploring how workforce context shapes employee interests and health priorities. 

Every employer wants benefits communication to feel relevant. But relevance does not look the same in every industry. 

A technology workforce may bring a different mix of household priorities. Employees in professional and financial services may place greater emphasis on stress management. Retail and hospitality workforces may be more focused on retirement, commuting, and day-to-day financial security. 

Understanding those differences can help HR leaders shape engagement around the interests most likely to resonate with their own workforce. 

That’s where Evive^® offers a useful signal. 

Evive is bswift’s personalized recommendation engine. It delivers year-round, data-driven nudges designed to guide employees toward cost-conscious decisions and healthier outcomes. Each logic-backed recommendation triggers timely, relevant messages that drive action, whether encouraging preventive care, supporting condition management, or improving benefits utilization. 

Evive draws on millions of data points, including claims and spending behavior, enrollment and eligibility data, employee-selected preferences, and patterns across employee interactions over time. Together, these inputs help Evive personalize engagement with greater precision, making each interaction more timely, relevant, and better aligned to individual needs. 

One source of those employee-selected preferences is Evive Profile Builder, an experience that allows members to identify the interests and health topics they care about most. Those selections add another layer of context to the broader data Evive uses to determine which content and resources are most relevant to each member. 

In article one and article two in this four-part series, we explored how employee interests and health topics change across career stages. For this next analysis, the Signals by Evive data team examined Profile Builder selections from 99,350 users across seven industry segments. 

The chart below shows the industries included in the analysis and the number of Profile Builder users represented in each. 

The analysis below reflects active Profile Builder selections as of July 1, 2026. The selections are voluntary and self-reported, providing a direct signal of the interests employees want to hear more about. The findings represent a point-in-time view of participating Evive members and are not intended as fixed statements about every employee within an industry. 

Five priorities connect nearly every workforce

The chart below shows the top five interests in each industry.

Despite the differences among these industries, the same five interests comprised the top five in nearly every segment: 

• Fitness 

• Retirement 

• Nutrition 

• Stress management 

• Sleep 

Fitness ranked first in five of the seven segments. Retirement took the top position in Commercial and Consumer and Energy. 

For HR leaders, the consistency we see here creates a strong foundation for workforce-wide engagement. Across industries, employees are expressing interest in their physical health, financial future, nutrition, sleep, and ability to manage stress. 

These common priorities can anchor broad benefits campaigns while leaving room to personalize around the needs that become more prominent within particular workforces. 

Three industries reveal distinct engagement opportunities

Beyond the common top interests, several industries showed clear departures from the broader pattern. 

The chart below highlights three of the most distinctive differences. 

These differences point to different opportunities for benefits engagement. 

In Professional and Financial Services, stress management rises to third, suggesting stronger relevance for resources that support resilience and emotional wellbeing. 

Technology shows a different mix of household priorities. Childcare falls outside the top 10 while pet care appears, creating a distinct pattern within the dataset. 

Commercial and Consumer shows the clearest financial divergence. Financial planning ranks third, while commuter benefits reaches seventh, signaling interest in both long-term security and everyday financial needs. 

Evive Profile Builder makes these workforce differences visible. HR leaders can use employees’ stated interests to give greater prominence to the benefits and resources most likely to resonate within their own organization. 

Commercial and Consumer sends a stronger financial signal

Commercial and Consumer includes retail, food service, media, and hospitality — the largest segment in the analysis by a wide margin, and the one with the clearest money story. Fitness leads almost everywhere else. Here, Retirement takes the top spot, and the rest of the ranking backs it up. 

The chart below shows the seven leading interests selected by Commercial and Consumer employees. 

Retirement, financial planning, and commuter benefits all ranked more prominently in this segment than they did across most other industries. Together, those selections suggest that financial security and everyday affordability may be especially relevant engagement themes for these employees. 

The distinction is relevant because a strong financial signal can point to very different needs. An employee focused on building long-term savings may require different guidance from one concerned about immediate costs. Broad financial–wellness messaging alone cannot account for that difference. 

Personalization can. 

What this means for benefits engagement

Taken together, the data points to the same two-layer engagement strategy that emerged in the first article in this series. 

Employers can build broad campaigns around the priorities employees share, then use personalization to surface the benefits and resources that align with each employee’s circumstances. 

That second layer is where Evive creates enormous value. Profile Builder helps employers understand what employees care about, while Evive uses those signals to deliver more relevant guidance throughout the year. 

For HR leaders, Evive offers a seamless opportunity to make a broad benefits program feel personally useful across industries, roles, and working environments.  

Employers may offer broadly similar benefits, but the interests most likely to drive engagement can look very different from one industry to another.