Here's a number that tends to surprise leadership teams: according to Gartner's Employee Value Proposition survey, only around a quarter of employees who have access to mental and emotional wellbeing programs actually use them. Physical and financial wellness offerings see similarly thin participation. Companies are spending real money on these programs, and most of that spend is quietly going unused.
This isn't really a case of employees not caring about their health. Separate research from the Integrated Benefits Institute found that when employees are asked why they'd want to participate, the top reasons are exactly what you'd expect - improving physical health, managing stress, supporting mental wellbeing. The desire is there. What's missing is something else entirely, and it's usually not what leadership assumes.
Why Participation Actually Stays Low
Before fixing this, it's worth being honest about why it happens, because the usual assumption - "employees just aren't interested" - doesn't hold up well against the data.
Time is the biggest one, by a wide margin. In the same IBI research, lack of time was cited by over 60% of employees as their main barrier, well ahead of lack of interest. A related Cornell University study, run inside a Fortune 500 company, found that programs perceived as too time-consuming or simply "overwhelming to engage with" were consistently the top-rated obstacle - more than cost, more than skepticism about results, more than any medical or physical barrier.
A lot of people simply don't know the program exists, or how to use it. Roughly half of employees in the IBI survey weren't even aware their employer offered a wellness program in the first place. And even among those who are aware, a separate industry report found that 68% of employees said they didn't take advantage of available benefits because the process felt too complicated or too time-consuming to navigate - not because they didn't want the benefit itself.
One-size-fits-all programs quietly exclude a lot of people. A step-count challenge or a lunchtime yoga session sounds inclusive on paper, but it assumes a fairly narrow type of employee - someone with a flexible schedule, a certain fitness level, and an office-based routine. Research on workplace health promotion has consistently found that uniform programs tend to draw in people who were already reasonably healthy and engaged to begin with, while the employees who might benefit most - those under the most stress or carrying the highest health risk - often participate the least.
Leadership behaviour undercuts the program more than most companies realise. Research from the Health Enhancement Research Organization has found that visible leadership support is one of the strongest predictors of participation in workplace wellness - arguably stronger than any specific program feature. The contradiction employees notice fastest is when a company promotes mental health days while managers quietly discourage people from actually taking them, or sends wellness newsletters about sleep while entire teams are routinely working late. Employees read the gap between what's said and what's modelled far more closely than any internal comms plan accounts for.
What Actually Moves the Needle
Fix awareness before anything else. If half your workforce doesn't know a program exists, no amount of program redesign will help. This usually means moving beyond a single onboarding mention or a buried intranet page - repeated, simple reminders through the channels people actually check (team meetings, direct manager conversations, not just a company-wide email from an unfamiliar executive) tend to work far better than a one-time announcement.
Reduce the friction to actually start. If signing up requires five steps, a separate login, or scheduling something weeks in advance, a lot of interested employees will simply never get through it. The programs with better participation tend to make the first step almost frictionless - a single click, an easy default time slot, minimal paperwork.
Build in real variety, not just more options. This isn't about offering fifteen different wellness modules - it's about making sure the offerings actually reflect what different groups in your workforce need. A caregiver juggling eldercare has a different set of pressures than a 24-year-old new hire, and a program that only speaks to one of them will keep losing the other. This is exactly why starting with employee input, rather than a generic template, tends to pay off over time.
Make it fit into work hours, not just around them. Programs offered only outside working hours effectively ask employees to spend personal time to access a workplace benefit, which is a big part of why time constraints keep showing up as the top barrier. Building at least some wellness activities into the actual workday - even briefly - signals that the company means it, rather than treating wellbeing as something employees should handle on their own time.
Get leaders to actually participate, visibly. This is less about a formal endorsement and more about small, consistent behaviour - a manager blocking their calendar for a wellness session and actually attending it, a senior leader mentioning they used the counselling benefit themselves, or simply not scheduling meetings during a designated wellness hour. Employees calibrate what's "actually okay to use" based on what leadership does, not what the policy document says.
Track participation by group, not just in aggregate. A healthy-looking overall participation number can hide the fact that the employees who need the program most - those under high stress or with elevated health risk - are the ones opting out. Breaking down usage data by team, role, or demographic (where appropriate and privacy-respecting) helps catch this gap early, rather than discovering it a year into a program that looks successful on paper but isn't reaching the people it was meant for.
Conclusion
Low participation in wellness programs almost never comes down to employees not caring about their health - it comes down to time pressure, low awareness, poor accessibility, and a visible gap between what leadership says and what leadership actually does. None of the fixes here require a bigger budget or a flashier platform. They require making the program genuinely easy to find, easy to start, relevant to different groups within the workforce, and visibly backed by the people at the top - which, based on the research, matters more to actual usage than almost anything else a wellness program can offer.
