Time to Shift to What Matters: Wellness Delivered to Employees

Employers around the globe are investing in wellness solutions to improve the well-being of their employees. Typically, they work with platforms that include a range of physical, financial, and mental wellness benefits and that charge monthly subscriptions. CEOs and HR leaders understand the win-win: healthier and happier employees leads to higher retention and productivity, improving the company’s bottom line. However, despite these promising outcomes, employer churn from these benefit solutions is on the rise. The primary driver? A pervasive difficulty in quantifying the true impact, whether real or perceived, that these wellness solutions have on employers and their employees.

Employee wellness platforms typically frame their value proposition and impact in three main ways, yet none are fully convincing HR leaders:

1. Reduction in Talent Attrition and Improvement in Productivity

Wellness providers often claim that their solutions reduce attrition and improve productivity. While these are attractive outcomes, they are nearly impossible to measure with precision. Attrition is influenced by a myriad of factors — compensation, work environment, career opportunities, and leadership — that differ vastly across employee profiles and geographies. Productivity is equally nebulous and difficult to track, as it’s hard to isolate the effect of a wellness benefit from other workplace dynamics. Employers simply don’t buy this argument, and it’s understandable why.

2. Engagement and Usage Metrics

Many platforms tout engagement statistics: the number of employees using a solution and the frequency of use. While this might seem logical at first glance, it falls short for two critical reasons. First, it doesn’t differentiate between the size of the impact of using specific benefits. For instance, a small discount on a purchase is hardly comparable to the value of a free annual health check-up. Second, it fails to aggregate impact across multiple benefits. A therapy session, interest from a savings program, and a nutritional consultation all contribute differently to wellness. Engagement and usage metrics do not account for these differences by treating them all as equal.

3. HR and Employee Satisfaction Scores

Another common metric is satisfaction measured by HR leaders and employees. This is strongly influenced by comparing the new wellness benefits to what they previously had. While helpful in gauging perception, this approach fails to provide tangible, quantifiable impact. Perception alone cannot justify continued investment in wellness platforms, especially when budgets are under scrutiny.

Rethinking the Measurement of Wellness Impact

The way we measure the impact of wellness solutions must evolve. This requires a shift grounded in three key principles:

1. Focus on the Employee: Wellness and benefits are meant for the employee. Hence, the core metric should be focused on the employee. Improvements in employee retention and productivity are secondary and indirect effects.

2. Wellness Delivered, Not Wellness Offered: Instead of taking into account the list of benefits that employees have access to, we should measure what they actually use. Too frequently in companies there is a disconnect between wellness offered and wellness delivered. For wellness delivered, measure bottom-up, accounting for every benefit used by every single employee.

3. Quantify Impact in Monetary Value: Wellness impact must be tied to its monetary value. Specifically, how much would the employee need to pay for the comparable benefit in the open market? This approach allows us to differentiate and quantify the benefits accordingly. Moreover, the impact can now be aggregated across all used benefits and all employees. This is key as it provides employers with a clear understanding of the total monetary value of wellness delivered every month and can be easily compared to the monthly cost of the wellness platform. 

Measuring Wellness Delivered in Practice

To transform how impact is measured, we must pivot to a model based solely on wellness delivered, expressed in monetary value and calculated bottom-up. At minu, the leading employee wellness in platform in Mexico, our 3,000-plus employers have access to dashboards and detailed reporting that:

• Aggregates Monetary Value of All Benefits Used by All Employees Every Month: The reporting sums up the monetary value of each benefit utilized by each employee. This includes, for example, the savings from their redeemed discount, the amount covered by an insurance policy, the savings from accessing earned wages instead of taking a loan, the interest accrued on their savings program, the tax savings from using their grocery neo-voucher card,  the cost of their free online consultations with pediatricians, lawyers, or veterinarians, or free access to gyms or financial educations courses, and so on. 

• Comparisons to Monthly Cost of Platform:  Our clients can easily compare the aggregated monetary value of all wellness delivered in a month to their monthly subscription of our wellness platform. This allows employers to assess the return (wellness delivered) on their investment (platform subscription) in concrete terms, which averages 350%-plus across our client portfolio. 

By shifting to this approach, employers can clearly see how much value is being delivered to their employees each month. No more vague claims about improved retention, high engagement, or satisfaction. Instead, the focus is on measurable outcomes that tie directly to the platform’s cost.

The Bottom Line

For wellness platforms to thrive and to reduce client churn, they need to provide employers with transparency and tangible results. This means abandoning outdated metrics and focusing on a single, powerful question: “How much wellness, quantified in monetary value, is actually being delivered to my employees?” The answer to this question will not only validate the investment but also build trust and loyalty between employers and wellness providers.

The industry’s future depends on this shift. It’s time to measure what truly matters: the real, tangible impact on employee wellness.

Nima Pourshasb is CEO and co-founder of minu, the leading employee wellness platform in Mexico with 3,000-plus clients. He is a serial entrepreneur in Latin America, having started companies in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a MEng from Imperial College.