Well-being benefits fit into a wide range of offerings and niches you can offer to you teams. So how do you know what they want, what they will use and what will benefit them to bring their best to work?
We wanted a data-driven approach to answering these questions so we partnered with Quantum Workplace, a leading workplace survey and employee feedback technology company. We analyzed feedback from nearly 2,000 survey responses to produce the report “Workplace Well-Being: Provide Meaningful Benefits to Energize Employee Health, Engagement, and Performance.” The data said a lot about what employees want, what they currently get and what motivates them to be their best at work and outside of it.
Top level ideas that make or break well-being benefits for employees
There are innumerable benefits that can be given to employees, but two concepts held the most weight — no matter what the specific kind of well-being benefit was — when finding out what drove engagement. The lack of these two detracted employees from engagement with well-being benefits. They are satisfaction and communication and clarity.
Satisfaction
Employees who are not satisfied with their well-being benefits are much less likely to engage with them. Employers who offer benefits that don’t feel useful or relevant to the populations within their company will struggle to impress and engage their staff — basically wasting the money spent on these programs.
Three-fourths of engaged employees, those committed to the goals and culture of the company, said they were satisfied with the health and well-being benefits their organization provides. Aligning the well-being benefits program with the company culture leads to a positive feedback loop between what a company claims to be and what that company is.
Communication and clarity
If employees are unsure what their well-being benefits are or where they can access them, they are twice as likely to be disengaged at work. Any program that adds extra steps between finding and using the program for it’s end user will result in a lower engagement rate with that program or platform. Clear and unified communication from leadership, HR or team leaders around how to access and use a well-being benefit platform is necessary
What well-being benefits employees want vs. what employees get
Not all well-being benefits are ideal for your organization. For instance, if you have a lot of staff 56 years and older, financial wellness programs are much less likely to be used compared to employees 25 or younger.
Here are other findings about which plans employees want:
Stress Management: Only 28 percent of employers provide stress-relief breaks, such as meditation, massages, or required breaks, yet more than 71 percent of employees desire it. Offering these employee forward breaks would service a large swath of people who would use it.
Nutrition: More than 73 percent of employees want healthy cafeteria or vending options at work, but fewer than half of employers provide it.
Physical fitness: A piece of data we found surprising was that regular exercise — three times a week or more — has little to no direct impact on employee engagement. Still, half of employees want an onsite fitness center and time for healthy activities at work.
Work-life balance: Nearly three-fourths of employees want flexible work hours, and those who do are nearly 20 percent more engaged. However, fewer than half of employers provide flexible work hours.