What should your health and wellbeing benefits look like in 2025?

By Phil Steele and Will Turner, GoJoe co-founders

Let’s start by addressing the obvious; we’re far from experts on HR strategies and knitting together the various benefits that best suit your business.

Our position of strength in this space comes from two core areas; having spent five years building a corporate health fitness app which is now rolled out as a benefit by some of the biggest companies in the world.  But also, spending so much of that time talking to hundreds of organisations around the world (not to mention thousands of the actual end users, or as we call them, ‘Joes’!) on their needs and their pains - and how they plan to use one to solve the other.

We’ve also gone out to our network to survey their thoughts. To ask them for their wish lists and their ‘wish I didn’t have’ lists around benefits. We’ve then pulled all those responses together, married with the insights we’ve gathered from speaking to countless HR and wellbeing leads to try to make sense of the demands and trends of the next 12 months.

And here’s what we’ve learned.

What are the 3 main problems facing HR and wellbeing leads?

We regularly hear about the challenges teams face. And these are often wide ranging from resource to engagement but the top three from our survey were:  

1) Staff retention and attraction:

Not a new problem but it’s consistently something we’re told about and our survey backs this up as the number one challenge for teams. Can a benefits strategy help? Research certainly suggests so, with studies showing 78% of employees considering the benefits offered when weighing up a job offer while 75% of existing employees are more likely to stay to retain existing benefits rather than look elsewhere.

So the key is to offer the right benefits. More on this below but, in short, benefits matter and impact your retention and attraction.

2) Cost of mental health:

We know that cost of health is rising globally driven by increased demand as well as wider inflation. Mental health costs contribute significantly to this, with the ABI quoting that demand for support in the UK has increased by 140%. One blue chip organisation we know attributes over a third of all absence to mental health and just under 30% of associated cost.

With employers expected to do more to bridge the gap between their staff and public health services, costs of services and the demand for these are naturally rising rapidly and businesses are having to be forward thinking and creative to get ahead. More proactive services and thinking about combined mental and physical solutions are two ways in which the market is doing just that.  Employers – burned by the tailwind of COVID and rapid investment into products that over-promise and under-deliver in terms of impact and ROI – are both wary of rising costs but also nervous about spend.

3) Culture:

Harder to define (and measure) but culture is an increasingly harder problem to combat in an age of more hybrid and remote working as well as greater expectations on work-life balance and promotion of healthy living.

The lack of the five-day office working week is great for employee balance and has done wonders for so many people and businesses. But for some it comes at a huge cost of wider company culture.

For many, gone are the days of quick fixes to bond teams; more relaxed Fridays in the office, team lunches and the odd post (or sometimes pre) 5pm pint. The constant battle for balance as well as translating and instilling company culture is one HR and wider business leaders are always searching for. The answer is different for everyone but what we do know is that more traditional ways of connecting teams is very much a pre 2020 era. And you know what, maybe the decline of the raft building company away day is no bad thing.

So what do these three big challenges teach us about benefits and wellbeing - and what should we do about it? To us the three are connected. Stronger culture can support staff retention, and vice versa, while culture – potentially driven by benefits and wellbeing – can support mental health in the workplace. And it all ties back to the bottom line. Healthier, more engaged and experienced staff will reduce health costs and drive productivity.

What are the most popular benefits for organisations currently?

To be clear, popularity here is defined by amount of uptake or size of impact within an organisation. And there are two clear trends; financial support and health.

Over 50% of leaders championed a benefit which has direct financial value to employees, such as discounts or vouchers, as its most popular, while a similar figure (given some overlap between the two) said health and fitness-based benefits were trending highly. Benefits such as PMI, gym access and eye care vouchers were all referenced as having strong uptake from staff.

So the sweet spot? Reducing the barrier of cost for employees to get and/or stay fit and healthy is the clear winner. And it might help you attract the next generation of leaders with the majority of 18-34 year olds now wanting more financial and health benefits too.

And, spoiler alert, this trend shows no sign of stopping. Especially when factoring in the rising costs of health such as PMI and absenteeism. It’s a conversation we are increasingly having with almost every business at the moment. If we had to run a mile for every time we heard ‘our health cost challenges are no different to everyone else’ we’d probably do enough training to break into Team GB for the 2028 Olympics.

And while we’re here, the least popular benefits were commuting-based benefits such as cycle schemes and season ticket loans. No surprises there given the shift in workplace patterns.

What wellbeing benefit trends are HR leaders most excited about?

So what’s next for wellbeing benefits? Well, the responses stick very much to the health theme with two clear trends standing out.

Preventative healthcare:

The on-trend phrase at the moment but for very good reason. A third of our respondents said this was their number one benefit trend for 2025. It also ties in with reactive measures such as EAPs performing relatively poorly in our responses around impact of benefits.

From the Department of Health and Wes Streeting down, there’s an increasing desire to combat long-term sickness via preventative healthcare with the aim to reduce the number of people off work, improving the lives of individuals but also business productivity too.  

If we can get people moving more and empowering themselves to do so we’ll drive better physical and mental health and get ahead of potential long-term issues. This can have a significant impact on all parties.

An investment in people, their health and in tackling health costs? Feels like a no brainer. No wonder it’s on the up.

Connecting physical and mental healthcare:

The second, with over a quarter of respondents referencing it, was the amalgamation of care for physical and mental health. As costs for both rise, combining these tackles an element of cost but also makes life easier for the HR team and, crucially, the employee and user.

One pain point we’re increasingly hearing from leaders is the volume of services and associated platforms, apps and websites that come with it. Hard to manage, even harder to navigate for the user. The result? Reduction in use and impact.

Which other benefits are people considering adding to their portfolio in the 2025?

Driven by employee demand and the wider increases in costs of living, financial wellbeing initiatives were the clear winner in terms of what teams are cooking up for next year. Emergency savings, financial education, EAPs, health and dental insurance many others are out there to help teams support their colleagues.

What does this all mean?

To some degree, what we’ve learned confirms what we all already know. Teams are stretched financially and playing catch up on employee demands while at the same time juggling rising costs and too many platforms.

Challenges such as PMI premium increases, inflation, long-term sickness and wider culture/engagement concerns are no longer industry trends but the reality of everyday problems teams face.

But for the benefits industry, the path forward is getting clearer on how to combat these. Health, both financial as well as physical and mental, is the clear priority that many are focused on.

Get that balance of offerings right and organisations can really start to tackle those challenges head on and deliver return on investment for their organisations and support colleagues across the business.

About GoJoe:

GoJoe is the world’s most inclusive employee health and fitness app, designed to boost health and reduce health costs.  

To learn more about GoJoe and how we do this, visit browse the site or book a demo and speak to the team.

Or why not try our new cost saving calculator to see how much using GoJoe in your business can impact the bottom line.

Offering solutions from one-off team based challenges to a year-round benefit, GoJoe creates a sense of belonging via health and fitness - whatever your level or activity - with the aim of driving positive change for people and the organisations they work for.

GoJoe brings people closer and helps them exercise on their own but never alone. Because we believe in the power of social connection. To achieve more, together.

So join the movement with the likes of Natwest, Diageo, Amazon, and countless others who are using GoJoe to inspire their teams to move more and save money while they do it.

Ready? Set? GoJoe.

‍