Most wellness benefits are budgeted as if every employee will use them. They never do. Planning around the real participation rate instead of the theoretical one is the difference between a benefit that renews and one that gets cut.

The number nobody puts in a proposal

Across our corporate clients, roughly half of enrolled employees book something in a given month. The rest are enrolled but inactive, some permanently, some seasonally.

The same pattern shows in the credits themselves. Of the credits a company allocates in a month, roughly half are actually spent.

This is not a FitKit problem, it is how voluntary benefits behave everywhere. What matters is what that unused half costs you, and that depends on your billing basis.

Why the billing basis changes the stakes

• Per allocated credit. You pay for the unused half. Every inactive employee is budget spent with nothing to show for it, so raising participation is your only way to improve the return.
• Per spent credit, also called pay per use. You are invoiced only for credits spent on completed check ins, so the unused half is not charged. Here you can set a generous ceiling without paying for it, and your invoice moves with usage.

Ask FitKit which basis applies to you. On a flat monthly fee per employee, whether from us or anyone else, you pay 100 percent of the allocation regardless of usage, which is the most expensive way to carry a 50 percent participation rate.

If finance needs a fixed monthly figure rather than one that moves, ask for a capped model instead of a flat fee.

What raises participation

Participation is not fixed. Four things move it, in order of impact:

• Allowance size. Below about four visits a month the benefit is perceived as unusable and people stop trying.
• Breadth of categories. Employees who will never book a gym session will book a massage, a psychologist or a nutritionist. Restricting categories to fitness alone cuts your participation roughly in half.
• Internal launch. A benefit announced once in an email onboards far fewer people than one with a proper launch. See the article on the first 30 days.
• Network fit near each office. If employees request a location you do not have, tell us and we approach it.

What to measure

Ask FitKit for these five figures every month, not just the invoice:

• Employees enrolled.
• Employees who have activated their account at least once.
• Employees active this month.
• Credits allocated versus credits spent.
• Top categories and locations used.

The gap between enrolled and activated is your onboarding problem. The gap between activated and active this month is your engagement problem. They have different fixes, so measuring them separately is worth the effort.

How to use this at renewal

If half your employees are inactive, the honest question is not whether to cut the benefit but why those employees never started. In most cases the answer is one of the four items above, and all four are fixable without increasing the budget.

Want your own participation numbers reviewed before you decide on renewal? Ask FitKit for a utilisation review. We will bring the figures whether or not they flatter us.