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Why take-up is low, and what to do about it

Most organisations buying a wellbeing benefit have bought one before, and watched it go quiet by the second quarter. The post-mortem usually lands on communication. Sometimes that is true. More often people knew exactly where it was and decided it was not worth ten minutes.

By Chinmay Bhatt, Founder, HumotronUpdated 15 October 20263 min read
Written forReward and benefits manager
The job in handWorking out why last year’s benefit went quiet
Read it in3 min
01The short version
  • Low take-up is the norm, not your failure. It is well documented across the category.
  • The usual cause is the first session, not the announcement.
  • The only honest measure is whether people come back.
  • Say "take-up" and "activation". "Engagement" is not an outcome.
02The size of it
82%of employers reported EAP take-up between 0 and 25%. Nobody reported above 75%.Employee Benefits reader poll, July 2024 ↗
27%of employees in one study did not know their employer had an EAP at all.HCML research via Personnel Today, June 2024 ↗

The second study was run by a company that sells corporate health, so read the direction rather than the decimal. The first is a poll of the trade’s own readers.

03The four reasons
The first session costs too muchAn account, a long questionnaire, a download, a wait. Every step before the first useful moment is a place to stop, and the busiest people stop earliest.
The output is genericIf the advice at the end would suit anyone, the questionnaire was not worth filling in. People spot the difference between personalised and segmented within one screen.
It looks like monitoringAnything that might report upward gets used carefully or not at all. It does not have to actually report to look like it does.
Nothing changes afterwardsA benefit that produces one answer and goes quiet has no reason to be opened twice.
04What gets opened a second time
  1. 1
    Something specific on the first visit. Not a score or a category. Something about them they did not already know.
  2. 2
    A reason to return that is not a reminder. Something that changed because their data changed, not because a scheduler fired.
  3. 3
    No feeling of being watched. Shown by how it is built, not asserted in an FAQ.
Do
  • Describe the first session accurately, including how long it takes
  • Make access automatic and use opt-in
  • Measure return within a month
  • Let people leave without telling anyone
Don’t
  • Tie rewards to health outcomes
  • Run leaderboards on sleep or recovery
  • Give managers team-level visibility
  • Require a device purchase
05The shortest first session

The quickest route to something specific is to let the person bring their own data. Someone already wearing a tracker can connect it in two steps and see something about their own last six months without filling anything in. Someone wearing nothing answers a few more questions instead.

In Humotron’s benefits product, the sponsor sees counts and nothing else. That is architecture, not policy, which is the part employees can be told without it sounding like a promise.

06Questions

Should access be opt-in or automatic?

Access can be automatic. Use must be opt-in — anything processing health data by default is both a legal problem and a trust problem.

How do we communicate it without over-promising?

Say how long the first session takes and what the person gets at the end. Schemes oversold at launch go quiet fastest.

Can we see which teams are using it?

Not through Humotron. Team-level reporting on a health benefit is re-identification at small headcounts.

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