BambooHR published a guide this year called the 2026 Open Enrollment Survival Guide. It names five challenges benefits teams run into every fall, and one of them is worth sitting with: decision fatigue.
The guide cites an Equitable survey (2024) of more than 1,000 U.S. workers: 53% say they regret the benefits choices they made during open enrollment.
The Challenge BambooHR Already Named
The guide's own explanation is the part that matters most: "HR typically leaves benefits decisions in employees' hands rather than actively guiding them, leaving employees to navigate genuinely difficult financial decisions alone."
That is a published admission from an HR platform, not a claim Petunia is making about the industry. It describes health plan elections: deductible tiers, HSA contributions, dependent coverage. These are choices employees with comprehensive benefits make once a year, every year they're covered.
Someone in their 40s, 50s, or early 60s has likely made this choice a dozen times or more, and still feels like they're getting it wrong! Now hold that same feeling next to a much bigger decision.
What Open Enrollment Has That Eldercare Doesn't
Open enrollment has a two-week window. It has a defined menu of plans. It has HR available to walk employees through it, and for more senior employees, years of practice picking between options to build their stack.
Now put that structure next to what a GenX or Elder Millennial employee has when their aging Loved One needs Assisted Living or Memory Care: no window, no menu, no one from HR walking them through it. And it can start on any of the 365 days in the year, with a fall, a diagnosis, or a conversation with your siblings because "Mom's not doing too well on her own."
It doesn't come with a menu because there isn't one to hand out: Assisted Living and Memory Care are scattered across a fragmented industry with no standard pricing and no reliable quality signals. 55% of caregivers of adults 50 and older say they have no long-range care plan in place at all, because no one, including HR, has ever walked them through what to expect.
The mismatch is direct: a lower-stakes annual choice comes with a season, a menu, and a guide. A high-stakes, once-in-a-lifetime decision, for someone you love, comes with none of it.
A Design-Phase Decision, Not a Crisis Response
BambooHR's own guide frames open enrollment in three phases: Design, Communication, and Execution. Eldercare almost never gets a Design conversation. It shows up in Execution, as a crisis: an employee who's suddenly out of the office and a manager asking HR what's available to help (the answer? not much!).
Telling, too, is where the guide puts it when it does show up. Caregiving and child care support make BambooHR's list of five benefits employers are already weighing for 2027, alongside GLP-1 coverage and paid prenatal leave. That's benefits leaders naming this pressure before most companies have a plan for it: worth measuring inside your own org now, not after it shows up as an Execution-phase emergency.
Petunia is built to give employers a way to support their GenX and Elder Millennial employees: a zero-cost benefit that guides a family through the Assisted Living or Memory Care decision the way open enrollment guides them through a health plan. A defined process, real guidance, and a tool that helps them build confidence in their decision. The only difference is it doesn't wait for a two-week window, and neither should the decision.