You work on your employees’ benefits programs to help them feel happier and healthier. However, not all of your employees are using them.
Although maximizing the reach of your benefits may be top of mind, it often doesn’t tell the whole picture.
Reach vs. Impact
The reach of a program includes how many employees enrolled or took steps to engage.
While reach is a good judge of interest in a program, it doesn’t always translate into impact.
Impact is how many employees changed their behavior because of a benefit offering. If you host fitness classes and 20 employees show up but only 2 or 3 participate, your reach was high but the impact of the program remained low.
Relevancy
Not every benefit will be relevant to every part of your organization. A targeted benefits program will include specific benefits assistance to different employee groups.
Wellness programs fail when they try to help everyone all at once.
Your benefits plans should give guidance to employees on a one-to-one basis for maximum effect.
The relevancy of your benefits to one group may not be the same as another. As you build out your offerings, keep your benefits diversified for the biggest impact.
Usage Rates
Even if you do everything the right way, there are some typical adoption and usage rates for wellness benefits of all kinds.
On average, about 15% of employees will participate in a program without much pushing.
Even when using marketing best practices, only about 50% of employees ever see engagement campaigns.
The remaining employees are either uninterested or don’t think a benefit is relevant to them.
The break-even point of a benefits program is much lower when it’s implemented correctly.
Even after you pour hours of work into getting a wellness program off the ground and making sure it’s just right, employees may still not utilize it.
In general, not every benefit will be relevant to every employee.
Instead of trying to find one-size-fits-all benefits, try to find benefits that are relevant to pockets of your employee population.
Targeted benefits are the most effective.
What do you think? We’d love to hear from you.