Employee Wellness Is Not About Free Perks. I Learned That the Hard Way

For a long time, I thought employee wellness was mostly about offering good benefits. Health insurance. A wellness allowance. Maybe a gym membership or some kind of mental health support. It sounded simple enough. But after working with different teams, I started noticing something that changed how I looked at employee wellness. Having a benefit and actually using a benefit are two very different things. I have seen companies spend a lot of time putting together what looks like a great benefits package, only to have employees barely use half of it. At first, I thought the problem was communication. Maybe employees did not know what was available to them. Sometimes that was true. But it was not the whole problem. People have different ideas of what "wellness" means This is probably the biggest thing I have changed my mind about. When someone says employee wellness, I used to immediately think about things like gym memberships, meditation apps, fitness challenges, or mental health programs. Those things can absolutely help. But wellness is much more personal than that. One employee might care about fitness. Another might be dealing with expensive dental treatment. Someone else might need help paying for glasses, physiotherapy, or other health-related expenses. And another employee might simply value having some flexibility in how they spend their benefits. That makes it difficult for an employer to create one wellness program that feels equally useful to everyone. The problem with one-size-fits-all benefits Imagine giving ten employees the exact same wellness benefit. On paper, everyone gets the same value. In reality, that probably is not true. One person might use it every month. Another might never touch it. That does not necessarily mean the second employee does not care about their health or wellbeing. The benefit might simply not fit their situation. This is where I think flexible benefits become interesting. Instead of deciding exactly what wellness should…