The wellbeing benefit worth investing in is the one people actually use

The Reward & Employee Benefits Association's 9th annual Employee Wellbeing Research, published in June 2024 with AXA Health, describes a pivotal shift in the responsibility for employee health. Rising healthcare costs, generational change and evolving DEI expectations are pushing employers to design wellbeing as a core part of the employment deal — not a set of perks bolted on the side.

The pattern most HR leaders will recognise: launch spike, slow decline, awkward renewal conversation. The benefits that survive that cycle share three things — they're daily-use, low-friction, and visibly used by leadership.

The three tests a benefit has to pass

• Relevance — does it solve a problem the employee actually has this week?
• Friction — how many clicks, forms or app installs before value?
• Signal — do managers and leaders visibly use it too?

Relevance is the one HR teams get closest to right and vendors get most wrong. A benefit that solves a real Tuesday-afternoon problem — what to eat, how to sleep, how to get 20 minutes of movement in — will always beat a benefit that solves a hypothetical one. Friction is where most wellbeing budgets quietly leak: a benefit that takes more than two minutes to reach on a phone will lose most of your workforce inside a quarter. Signal is the multiplier: the moment a director talks about using something in a team meeting, take-up moves in a way no launch email will ever match.

"If your CEO can't name the last time they used the benefit, your employees won't either."

Where the money should go

REBA's research consistently ranks financial wellbeing, mental health support and everyday health tools — nutrition, sleep, movement — as the categories with the highest sustained take-up. The common thread is friction: perks accessible from a phone, usable in under two minutes, with no scheduling required, outperform structured programmes by a wide margin.

The CIPD's Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025 report (published September 2025 with Simplyhealth) echoes this: employees rate practical, daily-use support far above one-off events or annual health checks. In a market where poor health is costing tens of billions a year, the highest-ROI wellbeing spend is the spend that gets used every day.

Weekly active users is the north-star metric

Most wellbeing dashboards still lead with sign-ups. Sign-ups measure the marketing launch, not the benefit. The metric that predicts renewal ROI is weekly active users — the number of people who used the benefit at all in the past seven days, divided by eligible headcount. A programme running above 25% WAU across a quarter is doing something real. A programme reporting 80% sign-ups and 4% WAU is a launch, not a benefit.

Layered on top of that, employers should track weekly active use split by tenure, team and location. Any wellbeing programme that only lands in head office is a segment perk. If frontline, shift and field-based staff aren't in the WAU number, the benefit is failing the people whose health outcomes drive the biggest costs.

A five-step design checklist

• Start with a problem statement, not a vendor list.
• Pilot with one team for 60 days and measure weekly active use, not sign-ups.
• Design for the phone first — desk-based rollouts exclude frontline staff.
• Bake the benefit into existing rituals (onboarding, 1:1s, team meetings).
• Report engagement to the exec team monthly, alongside cost per active user.
• Refresh comms every quarter — take-up decays without a nudge cadence.

The employers getting the best return on wellbeing spend in 2026 aren't the ones with the longest benefits menu. They're the ones who picked two or three daily-use programmes, measured them relentlessly, and quietly cut everything that wasn't earning its weekly active users. That is the discipline worth building the next budget around.