In my years as a benefits leader with companies like Salesforce, Lululemon, and Uber, I've experienced every scenario you can imagine.

But through it all, I've been on a mission to help my benefits teams get out of the day-to-day operational work so that we can focus on the big-picture, strategic work that brought us all to benefits in the first place.

It's time for benefits leaders to have a voice in higher-level, strategic business decisions.

Here are the four things I learned that helped my teams move from focusing on the operational to more strategic benefits work.