Employee wellbeing is just the beginning of a truly healthy organization.
How do you support your people, control costs, and deliver results—all at the same time?
If you’re leading HR at a self-insured company, you’re likely being asked to do a lot more with a lot less.
You’re managing rising claims and unpredictable utilization. Navigating an increasingly complex vendor stack. Balancing the pressure to keep employees engaged, attract top talent, and make the numbers work—all while aligning with leadership expectations.
So, it’s no surprise that wellbeing strategies can start to feel disconnected from the bigger picture—hard to measure, tough to scale, and often wildly out of sync with what your people actually need.
When people don’t feel supported, they check out. From their health. From their jobs. From the benefits you’re already investing in.
That disengagement? It’s not just frustrating. It’s expensive.
At Conference Board East, we unpacked why so many wellbeing strategies miss the mark —and what leading employers are doing differently to make healthier easier for everyone.
3 reasons why most wellbeing programs fall short
Most health and wellbeing strategies fail to deliver the outcomes leaders need because they’re built on outdated rules. They can be boiled down to these three common pitfalls:
- Over-reliance on incentives. Gift cards, points, step challenges… they’re fun, sure. But fun doesn’t move the needle if it doesn’t stick.
- Lack of integration. If care isn’t connected to company culture, it stays on the periphery—and people treat it like a checkbox.
- Too focused on short-term ROI. When you measure success in claims savings alone, you miss the real wins: retention, productivity, and human energy.
These aren’t just tactical missteps—they reveal a deeper disconnect. We’ve treated wellbeing as simply a place to log steps or earn gift cards instead of recognizing it as one piece of a system built to care for the whole person across their entire health journey.
What happens when care is disconnected
When care is fragmented—when wellbeing is one silo, clinical support is another, and culture floats somewhere in between—people fall between the cracks.
They delay treatment. They skip preventive care. They stop trusting the system entirely.
And that’s when the real costs show up: in absenteeism, turnover, burnout, presenteeism.
Disconnected care doesn’t just fail people—it fails businesses.
What leading employers are doing instead
The best companies aren’t adding more programs. They’re removing friction.
They’re shifting from reactive benefits to proactive, personalized health strategies that:
- Engage people early—before the ER becomes their go-to
- Guide them clearly—so they choose high-value care, not high-cost confusion
- Support them consistently—across physical, mental, and financial health
This isn’t fluff. It’s operational alignment. Health isn’t a program. It’s a principle. A system. A strategy. One that touches everything from onboarding to exit interviews.
Operationalizing wellbeing across the organization
So, what are these organizations doing differently?
- Training managers to care, not just manage
- Embedding health into daily workflows—not just open enrollment
- Measuring what matters: retention, engagement, culture—not just claims
It’s not “being nice.” It’s building a workforce that doesn’t burn out.
The ROI of a culture-connected health strategy
Organizations that adopt a more connected, person-centered approach to health are seeing measurable returns:
- Lower total cost of care through earlier intervention
- Higher engagement and satisfaction with benefits
- Improved retention in the face of labor market pressure
- Better outcomes for chronic conditions and mental health
And they’re not spending more. They’re spending smarter.
Because when you connect the disconnected, reject one-size-fits-all, and design to engage? You’re able to find more ways to save.
Make the shift from fragmented to focused
At its core, this isn’t just about rising costs or underused benefits—it’s about systems that weren’t designed to work together.
When health is fragmented, people disengage. And that shows up everywhere: in claims, in burnout, in missed chances to support the people who keep your business running.
You’ve seen what happens when support lives in silos. Now, imagine the alternative: a connected, culture-embedded health experience that meets people where they are—before, during, and beyond a health event.
At Personify Health, we help organizations move from fragmented systems to a unified, personalized health experience—designed around people, not programs.
Better health starts here.
Let’s talk about how we can help you build connected health experiences that support your people and your business.
