Wellbeing benefits are essential to attract new talents and keep current employees happy, however, usually have the common challenge of low engagement rates. During the pandemic, companies have been particularly proactive in looking for new wellbeing benefits to support their people with their mental health. However, a recent HBR study found that only 5% of employees were engaged with a new wellbeing solution for longer than two weeks. But the mental health struggles are real, people still need support. So, how come wellbeing benefits aren’t more used?
Why are they unused?
You might be doing all the right things: Getting feedback from employees on what they want, ensuring you’re communicating effectively across the company about the existence of these resources and even organised friendly competitions to encourage employees to sign up into your programme ; and yet, you may still struggle to get good engagement results. So what could be the problem?
1: There are so many resources available in so many different places that everyone gets confused. We all know what it’s like to be busy at work. You have ten complex tasks on your to-do list every day, reports to send, meetings to attend, emails to respond to, creative ideas to think about. So, we know employees won’t be spending too much time looking for different resources in different places.
2: You could offer five, ten or fifty different wellbeing resources to your employees, and still struggle with low engagement rates. If you try to please everyone by signing as many contracts with suppliers as you can, the race will be endless.
3: You’re giving people more and more choices but in a non-personalised way: We are not all on the same level of wellbeing awareness, and it can feel overwhelming for those who don’t yet know what they enjoy doing. A lot of people still associate wellbeing/mental health with EAP or a meditation app. But it might just not work for them, and they might need a little help to open their mind to other wellbeing resources. Rewards & Benefits Manager, can be heroes here by helping your people find what they really want to do to take care of themselves.
Possible Solutions
All the choices you can ever think of… all in one place.
By just putting all your resources in one, easy to access, place , you should see your engagement rates improving, and that’s a good start. There are options to offer a tremendous amount of choices to people (not only 5 or 10 benefits, but 100’s) all in one place, without having to deal with thousands of suppliers. As you can imagine, BetterSpace is one of them…
It’s easier for employees to use, but it also makes your life easier.
Choice is awesome. Personalisation, even better!
What is the difference between choice and personalisation? Empowerment. When you offer a solution which proactively suggests recommendations based on the individual’s needs and preferences, you empower them to try solutions which they will enjoy and get something from.
As mentioned above, everyone has a different wellbeing journey and offering personalised suggestions can help a lot of employees discover new ways to take care of themselves. Ways which work for them.
Only pay for what is being used
All of this sounds great, but how much are you going to spend for this wonderful solution?
I have good news for you! Instead of having to deal with lots of different contracts and payments, you can invest the budget in your people and let them choose how they want to spend it. Anything unused, isn’t wasted.
Not only are you going to help people feel better, empower them to take control of their wellbeing, but you are also going to save costs for your company.
