Employee wellbeing has become an increasingly broad category. Mental health support, physical fitness, financial wellbeing, counselling, sleep, nutrition and lifestyle services can all sit beneath the wellbeing umbrella: sometimes within one platform and sometimes through multiple specialist providers. That creates a challenge for HR and benefits teams evaluating employee wellbeing solutions. What exactly are they buying?
An employee wellbeing programme might provide a broad digital front door to several forms of support. Another provider may specialise exclusively in mental health or financial wellbeing. Others may combine technology with coaching, clinical services or third-party benefits.
Understanding the category therefore needs to come before comparing individual platforms.
What Is an Employee Wellbeing Platform?
A workplace wellbeing platform is typically a digital service designed to give employees access to wellbeing resources, tools or services through a website, app or both.
Depending on the provider, this can include:
- Mental health resources
- Counselling or therapy
- Fitness programmes
- Exercise classes
- Nutrition support
- Sleep resources
- Financial education
- Financial coaching
- Mindfulness
- Lifestyle content
- Health assessments
- Wellbeing challenges
Some platforms aim to bring many of these areas together.
Others concentrate on one or two.
That makes the term itself less important than establishing what employees can actually access through the service.
Wellbeing Principle
Don’t buy the category label. Map the support underneath it.
Bundled or Specialist Wellbeing Support?
One of the first decisions is whether the organisation wants a broad platform or specialist services.
A bundled workplace wellbeing app can provide employees with one destination covering several areas of wellbeing.
Potential advantages include:
- Simpler employee communication
- One point of access
- Consistent user experience
- Consolidated engagement data
- Easier discovery of different services
A specialist provider may offer greater depth in a particular area such as mental health, financial wellbeing or fitness. Neither approach is automatically better.
An employer with excellent existing physical and financial wellbeing provision, for example, may have little reason to replace it simply to obtain an all-in-one platform.
The more useful question is: Where are the gaps in our current wellbeing provision?
How Is a Wellbeing Platform Different from an EAP?
Employee Assistance Programmes and wellbeing platforms can overlap, particularly around mental health. But they are not necessarily the same thing.
An EAP has traditionally provided confidential support for employees experiencing personal or workplace difficulties, often including counselling, telephone support and advice.
A broader mental wellbeing platform or employee wellbeing app may also include preventative and everyday wellbeing resources designed for regular engagement, such as:
- Self-guided content
- Mindfulness
- Sleep support
- Wellbeing assessments
- Coaching
- Habit-building tools
Some modern providers combine elements of both.
Employers should therefore avoid assuming that introducing a wellbeing platform automatically removes the need for an EAP, or that an existing EAP already provides everything expected from a broader wellbeing programme.
What About a Benefits Portal?
A benefits portal serves another purpose. Its primary role may be helping employees discover, select or administer benefits such as pensions, insurance, discounts and salary-sacrifice schemes.
A corporate wellbeing app, by contrast, is typically designed around engagement with wellbeing support itself.
Increasingly, however, the boundaries overlap. A benefits platform might link to wellbeing services. A wellbeing platform might act as a gateway to existing benefits.
That makes integration particularly important.
Start with the Existing Wellbeing Ecosystem
Before evaluating a new platform, map what the organisation already provides.
This might include:
EAP + private medical insurance + occupational health + financial education + gym benefits + mental health support + employee discounts
Then ask:
What problem would another platform solve?
It may consolidate fragmented provision.
It may improve awareness.
It may introduce missing services.
Or it may provide a better digital experience.
Without that exercise, organisations risk paying for services they already have elsewhere.
Procurement Insight
The objective isn’t to accumulate more wellbeing benefits. It is to make the right support easier for employees to find and use.
Consider Integration
A workplace wellness platform should fit within the organisation’s wider HR and benefits technology.
Buyers should explore whether it can integrate with:
- HR systems
- Benefits platforms
- Employee communication tools
- Intranets
- Microsoft Teams or similar workplace tools
- Identity systems
- Existing wellbeing providers
Integration can reduce administration while making services more visible within the channels employees already use.
A technically capable platform that exists in isolation may struggle to attract regular engagement.
Make Access Simple
Every additional login creates friction.
Single sign-on (SSO) can allow employees to access a wellbeing platform using existing organisational credentials rather than creating and remembering another password.
For buyers, useful questions include:
- Does the platform support SSO?
- How are users provisioned?
- What happens when somebody joins or leaves?
- Is there a mobile app?
- Can employees access support away from a work device?
- How accessible is the service for different groups of employees?
These questions become particularly important for organisations employing frontline, mobile or deskless workers.
Look Beyond the App
A polished employee wellness app is only one part of the proposition.
Buyers should establish what sits behind the interface.
Depending on the service, that might include:
- Accredited counsellors
- Coaches
- Financial specialists
- Clinical professionals
- Curated content
- Third-party providers
- Crisis support
For services touching mental health in particular, employers should understand where general wellbeing support ends and clinical or emergency support begins.
The NHS advises that employers can support mental wellbeing at work, while employees experiencing mental health difficulties may require appropriate professional help.
NHS – Mental Health at Work – https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/advice-for-life-situations-and-events/mental-health-at-work/
Ask How Engagement Will Be Built
Buying a platform does not mean employees will use it.
Providers should be able to explain how they support:
- Launch
- Employee communications
- Onboarding
- Campaigns
- Wellbeing events
- Notifications
- Ongoing engagement
This matters because wellbeing needs are not static.
Financial wellbeing may become particularly relevant around changes to household costs. Mental health support may be needed at very different moments. Fitness engagement may vary throughout the year.
The platform needs to remain discoverable when the employee actually needs it.
Understand Usage and Engagement Reporting
Employers need enough information to understand whether their investment is reaching employees.
Useful reporting might include:
- Registrations
- Active users
- Repeat usage
- Content engagement
- Service utilisation
- Engagement trends
But wellbeing data needs careful handling.
Employees should feel confident that accessing sensitive support will not expose personal information to their employer.
Buyers should therefore ask providers both:
“What can you report?”
and
“What deliberately remains private?”
The ICO’s data minimisation principle requires organisations to ensure personal data is adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary.
ICO – Data Minimisation – https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/data-protection-principles/a-guide-to-the-data-protection-principles/data-minimisation/
Measure More Than Registrations
High registration numbers can make a platform launch look successful.
They do not necessarily demonstrate sustained value.
HR and benefits teams should consider whether employees:
Register → return → engage → use appropriate support
Measures can then be considered alongside wider indicators such as employee feedback and awareness of available support.
Measurement Principle
A wellbeing platform creates little value simply by being available. Its value comes when employees can find and use the right support when they need it.
Questions to Ask Employee Wellbeing Platform Providers
When comparing employee wellbeing solutions, employers should ask:
- Which areas of wellbeing does the platform cover?
- Which services are delivered directly and which by third parties?
- How does the service complement our existing EAP and benefits?
- Can existing wellbeing providers be integrated?
- Does the platform support single sign-on?
- How do deskless and remote employees access it?
- What launch and engagement support is included?
- What usage information can employers see?
- How is sensitive employee information protected?
- How do you measure ongoing engagement rather than registrations alone?
- What happens when an employee needs support beyond the platform’s scope?
- How easily can the service evolve as our wellbeing strategy changes?
Choosing the Right Employee Wellbeing Solution
The employee wellbeing market encompasses everything from specialist workplace mental health apps to broad platforms combining mental, physical and financial wellbeing.
That breadth makes defining the requirement particularly important. Employers should begin with:
existing provision → employee needs → gaps → access → integration → engagement → measurement
For some organisations, the answer will be a comprehensive workplace wellness platform.
For others, a specialist service may provide greater value.
The objective should not be to give employees the largest possible catalogue of wellbeing content.
It should be to make relevant, trusted support easy to discover and easy to access.
The Employee Benefits & Rewards Summit brings together senior HR and benefits professionals with leading suppliers through pre-arranged one-to-one meetings, providing an opportunity to explore employee wellbeing programmes, benefits technology, rewards and wider workforce solutions.
Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/diverse-group-of-colleagues-celebrating-success-in-office-ljG-4b5OXIM