Most Employers Hold Firm on Well-Being Offerings — But Want Results

Despite increasing costs and economic uncertainty, virtually all employers are staying the course with well-being offerings. ranging from mental health and weight management to financial education and resource groups, according to the results of the 2025 Employer Well-being Strategy Survey from the Business Group on Health. The report showed, however, that there’s growing pressure to ensure employees are getting the most from these wide-ranging programs, with more organizations seeking to quantify the impact.

The Business Group on Health is a non-profit organization representing large employers’ perspectives on optimizing workforce strategy through innovative health, benefits and well-being solutions and on health policy issues. Its survey, released in May, represents organizations that collectively employ 11.2 million people worldwide.

“Employers are looking to raise expectations for their own vendors … across all the entities employees look to for well-being support,” said Brenna Shebel, a vice president at the Business Group on Health and the leader of its Center for Data-Driven Insights.

Wide-Ranging Offerings

The group’s research showed 73% of surveyed employers plan to maintain their well-being programs in 2026, with an additional 20% planning to further enhance them.

Most polled organizations include a broad spectrum of offerings as part of their overall well-being strategy, covering:

• Mental health, included by 100% of employers surveyed. Employee assistance programs (EAPs) are nearly universal, followed closely by teletherapy (95%), mindfulness (94%), stress management (91%) and resiliency (89%).
• Physical health, included by 99% of employers. Notably, 66% of employers said the growing use of GLP-1 medications are impacting their approach to well-being programs such as fitness challenges and weight management, although only 2% plan to reduce or eliminate programs as a result.
• Financial health, with educational opportunities and tools to support financial decisions offered by 92% of employers.
• Lifestyle savings accounts and well-being incentives, averaging $600 per employee across surveyed organizations. A majority of employers plan to increase (29%) or maintain (46%) incentive amounts in 2026.
• Social connectedness and community, offered by 75% of surveyed employers, including employee resource groups (ERGs), peer coaching and mentoring.

Addressing Key Concerns

A broad spectrum of well-being offerings may help address a key challenge raised by another recent survey — employee concerns about financial security and rising healthcare costs.

As the workforce ages, nearly half of all employees are extremely or very concerned about declining physical (47%), mental or emotional (46%), or cognitive health (44%), according to Mercer’s 2025 Health on Demand report, which surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. employees. Nearly 1 in 5 (16%) are not confident they can afford the healthcare they and their families need, including disproportionate numbers of lower-income employees, women and those with health conditions or disabilities, the survey said.

The breadth of benefits matters, according to the report, which found a greater number of benefits positively impacted employees’ perceptions that their employers care about them, their sense of belonging and thriving in the workplace, and their confidence they can afford healthcare expenses.

“Benefits remain a crucial source of security for employees and a competitive advantage for employers,” said Ed Lehman, Mercer’s U.S. health and benefits leader, in a statement on the company’s website.

Employers prioritizing well-being experience 10% higher retention rates, along with higher productivity and reduced absenteeism, according to the Global Wellness Institute. “The question for organizations and leaders is no longer whether to invest in well-being, but how quickly they can make it central to their business strategy and, in doing so, strengthen their organizational and employee outcomes,” stated the institute in its Workplace Wellbeing Initiative Trends for 2025 report.

Growing Expectations

As well-being programs grow in importance, the Business Group on Health report found nearly all employers (94%) plan to raise their expectations for related outcomes. Shebel offered that dashboards can help surface these outcomes across all levels of an organization.

“It’s an area of opportunity, particularly for those that are looking to improve the outcomes and hold their vendors accountable,” she said. “If organizations are not collecting information and reporting out, that’s an area they can pursue in the coming year.”

According to the experts and reports mentioned in this article, key strategies for getting started include:

• Understanding your goals. “What are we trying to communicate, what is the goal and who is the audience? That paves the way for the level of information you provide,” Shebel said. For organizations beginning to assess the impact of well-being programs, for example, one goal may be to understand what programs employees are aware of and using. With 85% of multinational organizations seeking to deliver consistent well-being offerings globally, dashboards also can surface differences in benefits offered in different countries or markets and identify opportunities to add programming.
• Identifying metrics. Depending on the use case, metrics can include participation rates to understand whether employees are signing up for specific programs, as well as the impact of campaigns to increase awareness or participation. Other metrics may increase your insight on specific outcomes around different well-being areas, or the number of employees who have conditions such as diabetes or cardiovascular issues who could benefit from offerings.
• Targeting dashboards for different audiences. Key audiences range from senior leadership to managers and well-being champions at all levels of the organization. Understanding each stakeholder group is key to creating dashboards that reflect their needs and demonstrate impact.
• Iterating. Metrics and dashboards can evolve over time to shift from uptake to impact. However, iteration requires addition and subtraction to ensure continued usability. “The beauty of a dashboard is that it’s simplified, easy to digest and should be able to be interpreted on its own,” Shebel said.

Editor’s Note: Additional Content

For more information and resources related to this article, see the pages below, which offer quick access to all WorldatWork content on these topics:

• Employee Benefits
• Finance and Budgeting
• Total Rewards
• Well-Being