Are Workplace Wellness Programs a Waste of Money? An Honest Look
Workplace wellbeing has become a standard part of the employee experience. Organizations are investing in fitness, mental health, nutrition, financial wellbeing, challenges, education, and other ways to support their people.
Some employers are making a direct investment. Others have wellness dollars available through their benefits strategy. Either way, there is an important question worth asking:
Are employees actually using what is available to them?
Research suggests that the answer matters. A large study discussed by Harvard Health followed nearly 33,000 employees across roughly 160 worksites. After 18 months, employees offered a wellness program reported higher rates of exercise and weight management efforts. However, researchers did not find significant differences in outcomes such as medical spending, absenteeism, or job performance.
The study raises an important point for employers. Offering a wellness program and getting value from it are not the same thing.
Whether the programming is funded through wellness dollars or a direct investment, there is still an opportunity to ask better questions. Are employees using it? What are they responding to? And what can their engagement tell you about where to focus next?
That is where a wellbeing strategy becomes more than a collection of programs.
Start With What Employees Actually Want
It is easy to build a wellbeing calendar around what sounds valuable.
A topic feels relevant. A class sounds engaging. An initiative seems like something employees should want.
But employees are the ones deciding whether to participate.
One workforce may consistently gravitate toward fitness and movement, while another may show more interest in nutrition, mindfulness, financial wellbeing, professional development, or opportunities to connect.
Those differences tell us something.
Working across different organizations and types of wellbeing programming gives FitPros a firsthand view of how differently employees can engage. There is no single wellbeing calendar that will be right for every workforce.
That is also where FitPros Client Success Managers can help. Programming decisions do not have to rely entirely on assumptions about what employees might want. What employees are actually responding to can become part of the conversation around what comes next.
Your employees are already showing you what interests them. Pay attention to it.
Access Does Not Equal Engagement
Choosing relevant programming is only part of the equation. Employees still need realistic opportunities to participate.
Harvard Business School, citing Gartner’s 2021 Employee Value Proposition Benchmarking Survey, noted that while 87 percent of employees had access to mental and emotional wellbeing offerings, only 23 percent used them.
That gap between access and use is important.
Employees are balancing meetings, deadlines, full inboxes, and responsibilities outside of work. Even a valuable resource can be overlooked if employees do not know about it, forget it is available, or cannot easily fit it into their day.
This is where the way wellbeing is delivered matters.
FitPros LIVE, for example, gives employees different ways to participate through daily live programming, mobile and desktop access, catch-up content, and challenges. Clients also receive internal marketing resources to help keep programming visible without asking HR to create every communication from scratch.
These may sound like small details, but together they make it easier for employees to move from simply having access to actually participating.
And whether wellbeing programming is funded through available wellness dollars or a direct organizational investment, resources have more opportunity to create value when employees actually use them.
Look Beyond the Attendance Number
Once employees begin participating, there is another opportunity that is easy to miss.
The data can tell you more than how many people showed up.
Across FitPros programming, participation and engagement are tracked so clients have visibility into what employees are choosing. Over time, those numbers can begin to reveal patterns that a single attendance figure cannot.
If one type of programming consistently draws more participation than another, it is worth asking why.
Was it the topic? The timing? The format? Are employees returning to similar experiences? Did one session fit more naturally into the workday? Is interest in a certain area growing?
A lower-attended session does not automatically mean it lacked value, just as high attendance alone does not prove long-term impact. The context behind those numbers matters.
This is also where Client Success adds a human layer to the data. Tracking can show what happened. Looking at those patterns together can help uncover what may be driving engagement and what is worth considering next.
For HR teams, that creates an opportunity to move beyond simply reporting participation and start learning from it.
Make the Most of the Resources You Have
The conversation around workplace wellness often focuses on whether organizations should spend more or offer more.
That may not always be the best place to start.
Before adding another program, class, or initiative, look more closely at what employees are already telling you.
What are they choosing?
What are they coming back to?
Where is participation lower than expected?
Do employees know what is available?
Does the programming realistically fit into their workday?
What is the engagement data telling you about what to try next?
These questions matter whether your organization has a dedicated wellbeing budget, access to wellness dollars, or is deciding where to make a direct investment.
Making the most of workplace wellbeing starts with understanding what is already happening and using that information to make the next decision more informed than the last.
The Bottom Line
So, are workplace wellness programs a waste of money?
There is no simple answer.
What we do know is that having resources available does not automatically mean employees will use them. And without understanding participation, it becomes much harder to know what is resonating with your workforce and where your resources are having the most value.
At FitPros, that is why we pay attention to the entire experience. The programming matters, but so does how employees access it, what they choose to participate in, and what their engagement can teach us over time.
The goal is not simply to offer more wellbeing. It is to make better use of what you have and build from what your people actually use.
References
Harvard Health Publishing. Do employee wellness programs actually work? August 16, 2019.
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. How Workplace Wellness Programs Can Give Employees the Energy Boost They Need. August 28, 2023.
Looking for more? Contact a Wellbeing Manager to discuss your organizational wellbeing needs.
We provide workplace teams with mindful practices, personal and professional wellbeing growth, fitness instruction, and opportunities for social connection. We aim to inspire the highest potential in people at work, in life, every day, so they can show up healthy and at their best.
