You’ve checked off every box in preparation for your 2025 wellness program launch. You sourced new, impactful point solutions, mapped out monthly and quarterly wellness activities, and made everything more accessible than ever for your workforce.
And yet, you’re still concerned about participation fizzling out halfway through the year.
Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to ensure your employees utilize your wellness offerings. But there is one increasingly popular route employers are taking to motivate workforces, build excitement around program initiatives, and sustain engagement well beyond launch.
And the best part? Employees can do it all with the ones they love most—their families.
Why Family Wellness Is Your Ticket to Wellness Program Engagement
Allowing family members to participate in your wellness program may seem counter-intuitive when regular participation is already low. After all, it’s difficult and costly enough to garner the right wellbeing resources for your employees, and adding their families into the mix seems even more complicated and senseless.
As it turns out, allowing family members to partake in your wellness offerings may be the missing piece to your wellness investment puzzle.
A recent survey from Benefits Pro found that nearly a third of all workers are more likely to participate in wellbeing programs like health coaching when their spouses can also partake. A similar study from HERO in collaboration with Mercer echoed these findings, claiming that over 85% of employees have no interest in utilizing their companies’ wellness offerings when their spouses aren’t included.
Spousal Participation in Wellness Programming: Beneficial for Employers and Employees
From a business perspective, factoring spouses and families into larger wellness initiatives is a win-win.
Data suggests that families tend to see meaningful improvements in health outcomes like weight loss, nutrition, and pain management when working together. And although spouses only make up one-fifth of all people covered by employer-sponsored health plans, they generate one-third of healthcare costs. By improving the health of employees’ spouses and securing wellness program buy-in from families, employers can offset healthcare costs and boost program engagement.
For example, one large healthcare client saw a staggering 92% participation rate among its population after they started including spouses in their wellness program. Another major university saw that 74% of spouses alone were actively participating in their program, proving that families help each other stick with healthy habits for the long term.
For employees, the support that kids and spouses bring to their wellness goals can have a huge impact on their health outcomes. When their families are supported through their companies’ wellbeing programs, employees feel more connected, valued, and motivated at work, leading to a happier, more productive workforce.
Plus, tracking and incentivizing important health tasks like physical exams, flu shots, and dentist appointments for employees and their families boosts program utilization while keeping everyone laser-focused on their wellbeing.
3 Ways to Engage Employees and Families with Your Wellness Program
From solo fitness tracking to family weight loss challenges, the opportunities are endless when employees and their families can participate in your wellness program. With the added convenience of tracking progress from a wearable device, phone, desktop, and tablet, families can keep in touch while staying focused on their health goals.
Wondering how to get started and which wellness program elements will best engage your extended workforce? A great place to start is by aligning your initiatives with the various seasons of the year, so activities are topical, relevant, and personalized for families.
Here are three examples of wellness program features that leave a huge impact on your wellness program participation for fall.
1. Preventive Care Reminders
Juggling immunizations and annual exams can be overwhelming for families large and small. To prevent your workforce from prolonging much needed checkups, you can configure your wellness platform to send reminders in-platform or via text for important preventive care tasks.
Seeing constant reminders across devices will increase benefits utilization, and offering personalized rewards for completing various tasks like flu shots or dental appointments will motivate your employees to be proactive about their families’ (and their own) health needs.
2. Access to 24/7 Stress Management
Stress is at an all-time high for employees, but it’s especially high for overworked employees with families to care for. With nearly half of U.S. employees prepared to leave their jobs due to excessive amounts of stress, the onus is on employers to meet them halfway and provide easy, round-the-clock access to stress management resources.
From guided meditations and virtual counseling to breathing or stretch breaks, your wellness program can provide simple, easy activities that can go a long way in reducing stress for employees and their families. And, with the freedom to access these wellness activities at home, on a lunch break, or in between classes, families have constant access to stress management tools when they need them most, building healthy habits that last.
3. May the Best Family Member Win!
A little healthy competition can be a powerful motivator—particularly when families are involved. Setting up peer-to-peer challenges through your wellness platform doesn’t have to end between co-workers, teams, and departments—you can also open the door to families to expand participation and spice things up.
With temperatures cooling off and the holidays on the horizon, now is the perfect time for team-building challenges like step contests, healthy fall cooking competitions (“Soup Month,” anyone?), and charitable activities like toy drives or canned food collections. Not only are these challenges fun for employees, families, and coworkers alike, but they’re also effective ways to boost awareness of and engagement with your wellness program.
Make Family Wellness Your Go-To Strategy for 2025
In order for many employees to thrive at work, their families need to thrive, too. But just because spouses and kids aren’t on your payroll doesn’t mean they—and you—can’t benefit from their participation in your wellness program.
Choosing the right digital wellness partner can successfully set you up to offer a range of services that cater to the diverse needs of your employees and their families. From primary care reminders to stress management tools that are easily accessible in your wellness platform, a little goes a long way in improving the health outcomes of your employees and their families and the strength of your bottom line.
Want to learn more about how you can factor families into your 2025 wellness strategy? Reach out to our experts today for tips, guidance, and strategic insight.
