Employee Well-Being Plans Are Bruised & Broken: 5 Fixes

Your employee well-being plan is outstanding, right? So why aren’t employees using it enough? It’s likely bruised or broken in some ways.

How do we know that? Since the pandemic, two-thirds of organizations have introduced new well-being offerings — from mental and physical to financial and social, according to Gartner research. That led to increased well-being budgets.

Despite the increased investment and offerings, engagement wanes. Almost 80% of employees have access to a variety of well-being plan benefits, and just about 25% of them actually use what’s available, according to the Gartner EVP Benchmarking Survey.

That there — the lack of participation — is usually the first sign a well-being program is bruised or broken.

“A lot of companies introduce well-being programs and associated technologies with the best intentions, but they often miss the mark on aligning these initiatives with the actual needs and preferences of their employees,” says David Rice, an HR expert at People Managing People. 

Signs Employee Well-Being Plan is in Trouble

Here are four signs an employee well-being plan is broken or on its way.

• No feedback. You offer a plan, but you didn’t get feedback from employees on what they need or want. And when you lay out the plan, they aren’t engaged in the process or offerings.
• Poor communication. When employees ask questions that indicate they don’t understand how they benefit from the well-being plan or how to access it, they’re starting from a bad point.
• Lack of trust. If employees aren’t willing to share information that can help you design a plan or encourage others to participate, they might not trust you’re using their information to their benefit.
• Lack of participation. As noted above, if employees sign up for your well-being plan but don’t actually access it or participate in the events or offerings, the plan is likely not working.

“Wellness is not one-size-fits-all, and programs that fail to recognize the individualized nature of health and wellness are likely to see lower engagement,” says Rice.

But here’s the good news: People still consider a company’s well-being plan — and specific offerings within it — a valuable asset. In fact, nearly half of the employees who use the well-being plans available to them are highly engaged, compared to just 30% of employees who do not use them.

And the reason you want to fix a bend or break: Organizations that provide the full spectrum of offerings end up improving employees’ physical, financial and mental wellness by about seven percentage points, according to Gartner.

Fix an Employee Well-Being Plan

2Whether you think your employee well-being plan is bruised, broken or ready for an update, here are five ways to make improvements.

• Forget one-size-fits-all. Employees will participate more if they feel at least some of the offerings and benefits are targeted directly to them. So when you consider or introduce offerings, you might present them in a way that targets a specific audience. For instance, “For those who worry about student loans, you might be interested in …” Or, “For those who want to focus on improving their health, you might be interested in …” Or, “For anyone who wants to improve mental well-being, you might like to know about …”
• Find out what fits. Of course, you can’t offer the right initiatives for every kind of well-being — physical, mental, occupational, emotional, social, financial, environmental, etc. — if you don’t know what employees care about most. At least yearly, ask employees for feedback. And because employees often don’t know what they want, prompt them. Tell them about the things you might consider adding to your offerings and ask what they’d use. “Getting feedback on a regular basis is crucial in tailoring wellness programs to meet the needs of the workforce. The use of surveys, suggestion boxes and regular wellness meetings can help gather actionable insights,” says Rice.
• Start at the top. Get company leadership to champion your well-being offerings and initiatives. If they stand behind — and use — what’s there, employees will, too. This is especially true of mental well-being offerings. They can help get rid of any negative stigmas that hinder mental well-being.
• Train your leaders. If you get champions from the top, you’ll want managers and other leaders to help employees understand and access the wellness available. Beyond that, “training should focus on teaching leaders how to create inclusive environments that respect individual wellness journeys and how to motivate teams by setting examples in their own behavior,” says Rice.
• Track it. Despite your best efforts to get feedback and offer what employees want, they might not actually use what they said they would. People are fickle! So you’ll want to use analytics and any other data you have to identify trends and patterns in “employee engagement and health outcomes, guiding more informed decisions about program offerings,” says Rice.