Employee Incentives: Gym Memberships

Running a profitable business is usually dependent on a stable workforce. If you have high staff turnover or lose key staff from time to time, you need to consider what you can do to retain these staff.

Disengagement stems from over-exhaustion, ineffective management, or misalignment throughout an organization. Low morale leads to high turnover rates, low productivity, and ultimately, disengagement. Unhappy workers cost the U.S. up to $550 billion per year.

When this happens, you need to find a solution, fast!

The most obvious incentive is to pay more to your employees. But as soon as competitors match your pay rates, or offer to pay more, the value of your incentive vanishes.

Employee Incentive Programs

These programs can be introduced to attract, engage, and retain talent. The rewards and benefits included can be used to motivate positive behaviors in your workforce.

Perhaps the most important thing they can do to keep employees engaged is to effectively incentivize them. Incentives give employees something to strive for and provide tangible acknowledgment of their splendid work. When an incentive is offered, 85% of workers feel more motivated to do their best.

Gym Memberships Work as an Employee Incentive

In April 2021, the health and well-being app Engage recorded a 32% rise in demand for gym membership discounts.

The app found that employers were prioritizing health as a result of the impact of the covid pandemic. They reported that regular exercise reduced the risk of dying from infectious diseases like covid by more than a third and that a majority of adults want to be fitter and healthier.

Gym Memberships are now the most demanded benefit as part of an employee incentive scheme.

Workers are now looking beyond purely financial rewards in the workplace. They are actively seeking a better work/life balance and are increasingly expecting their employer to support this.

This is making health and well-being benefits something workers feel their job must-have, not something that would be nice to offer.

The increase in demand specifically for gym memberships does seem surprising as these are places people were unable to access during lockdowns.

With the negative impact on mental health caused by the pandemic, it may have been expected that more leisurely health and well-being options might have been more popular. Counselling, mindfulness, yoga, and gym equipment for the home would have seemed to be more relevant.

Employers are increasingly being seen as having a duty of care to ensure their workers are healthy. They are expecting employers to facilitate opportunities for employees to exercise and seek any physical and mental health support they may need.

Working from home during and following lockdown has increased rates of presenteeism and working longer hours. The World Health Organization has stated that working more than 55 hours a week leads to a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, than working 30 – 40 hours a week.

Despite this increasing popularity of gym memberships, it makes good sense for any employee incentive scheme to be flexible enough to consider similar spending for alternative health and well-being options, rather than only offering a gym membership.

Corporate Business Solutions Inc. can help guide you towards making the best decisions for your business around gym memberships and employee incentive schemes.

 

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