Live panel recap: How 3 organizations are proving wellbeing’s business impact

Most organizations can point to their wellbeing offerings. Far fewer can clearly demonstrate the value that those investments create. 

For HR, benefits, and wellbeing leaders at large organizations, this challenge feels especially familiar. When you manage thousands of employees across multiple locations, work with several wellbeing vendors, and face growing leadership scrutiny, proving the business impact of wellbeing becomes harder, not easier. 

As healthcare costs rise and workforce expectations evolve, leaders face increasing pressure to answer a fundamental question: How do you connect wellbeing efforts to meaningful business outcomes? 

That was the focus of a recent client panel titled: From Culture to VOI: Proving Wellbeing's Business Impact, hosted by Matt Percia, Strategic Advisor at Navigate, and featuring leaders from Nebraska Medicine, Rogue Credit Union, and Hillsborough County. While each organization approached wellbeing differently, their experiences pointed to the same challenge: how do you turn wellbeing investments into meaningful employee engagement and measurable organizational outcomes? 

The discussion highlighted several practical lessons for organizations looking to strengthen the impact of their wellbeing investments.  

Below we’ll explore a few of the key takeaways from the live session. 

Simplification creates engagement 

One of the biggest barriers to wellbeing impact is not a lack of resources. It is the growing complexity employees face when trying to navigate them. 

Many organizations have expanded their wellbeing offerings over the years, adding new programs, vendors, and point solutions in an effort to meet diverse employee needs. For enterprise employers especially, this often results in a fragmented benefits ecosystem: multiple logins, competing communications, and a patchwork of point solutions that few employees fully understand.  While well-intentioned, that expansion can create an unintended consequence: employees become overwhelmed by choice and disengage altogether. 

Nebraska Medicine has taken a different approach. 

As a healthcare organization, Nebraska Medicine’s workforce spends every day caring for others, often placing their own wellbeing last. Recognizing that reality, the organization has focused less on adding resources and more on helping employees understand, access, and act on the resources already available to them. 

As Ann, Employee Wellbeing Lead at Nebraska Medicine, explained: 

That philosophy led the organization to rethink how it communicated about wellbeing. Rather than positioning activities as annual requirements to complete, Nebraska Medicine began framing them as the starting point of an ongoing health journey. The goal was not simply to increase participation in a single event. It was to create a clearer pathway into the broader wellbeing ecosystem.

After reframing biometric screenings as the starting point of an employee's health journey rather than an annual compliance activity, Nebraska Medicine saw a significant increase in participation. Ann noted that response was roughly twice what it had been the previous year, filling all scheduled screening events and prompting the organization to add four additional sessions to meet demand.

Just as important, employees became more engaged with the organization's broader network of wellbeing resources and vendor partners. Participation in one activity increasingly led to engagement with others.

From a business perspective, this is where value begins to emerge. Organizations do not realize returns from benefits that sit unused. They realize value when employees actively engage with the resources available to them. By reducing friction and simplifying the employee experience, Nebraska Medicine increased participation, improved benefit utilization, and strengthened the connection between wellbeing investments and employee action.

The lesson is straightforward: before expanding a wellbeing portfolio, organizations may benefit from making it easier for employees to navigate the one they already have. For leaders working to justify their wellbeing spend, this matters. Simplification is not just an employee experience strategy. It is a strategy for increasing the value organizations receive from their wellbeing investments, and for building a clearer case for that value at the leadership level. 

Why caring for the whole person drives better outcomes

Employees do not experience wellbeing in silos. Financial stress can affect mental health. Physical health challenges can impact productivity. Caregiving responsibilities can influence emotional wellbeing and workplace engagement.

Recognizing those connections, Rogue Credit Union has built a wellbeing strategy that extends beyond traditional health initiatives and addresses multiple dimensions of employee wellbeing.

Michelle Matthews, Wellness Coordinator at Rogue Credit Union, oversees programs that support more than 760 employees through holistic wellbeing initiatives that support the whole person.

Underlying those efforts is a simple belief: 

That philosophy shapes how wellbeing is integrated throughout the employee experience. Rather than treating wellbeing as a standalone program, Rogue reinforces it through ongoing communication, personal connections, coaching, and visible leadership support.

The organization's results suggest the approach is working. Rogue has achieved 78% participation across its wellbeing platform while also reaching 50% participation in its financial wellness program. 

From a business perspective, relevance drives engagement. When employees see their real-world challenges reflected in wellbeing offerings, they are more likely to participate, utilize available resources, and remain engaged over time.

Rogue's experience highlights an important lesson for employers, especially those supporting large, diverse, and geographically dispersed workforces: wellbeing programs create more value when they address the full range of factors that influence employee health, engagement, and performance. The more relevant the experience feels to employees' lives, the greater the opportunity for meaningful participation and measurable impact. 

Watch the recording of the live session.

Moving beyond awareness

Many wellbeing programs begin with a simple assumption: if employees have the right information, they will make healthier choices.

Hillsborough County discovered that information alone is rarely enough.

Like many organizations, the county's early wellbeing efforts focused heavily on education, awareness campaigns, and providing employees with access to resources. While those efforts helped build awareness, leaders recognized an important reality: knowledge does not automatically translate into behavior change.

As Cheryl Murphy, Human Resource Manager at Hillsborough County, explained, the organization spent years experimenting, often throwing "spaghetti to the ceiling" to see what resonated with employees.

Over time, that experimentation led to a shift in strategy. Rather than focusing primarily on education, the team began creating opportunities for employees to take action.

Challenges, preventive care activities, incentives, and habit-building experiences became central components of the program. The goal was not simply to teach employees about wellbeing. It was to help them experience it.

One of the earliest examples was a hydration challenge that generated widespread participation and sparked conversations throughout the organization. What began as a simple activity evolved into broader discussions about preventive care, healthy habits, and personal wellbeing goals.

Today, that action-oriented approach continues to drive results. Hillsborough County reports approximately 84% onboarding and engagement participation and has seen preventive care rebate participation increase by roughly 15% since launching the program. 

The business impact extends beyond participation metrics. When employees move from awareness to action, organizations are more likely to see meaningful utilization of wellbeing resources, greater engagement with preventive care, and stronger long-term health behaviors. For leaders focused on healthcare cost containment, this connection is critical. Greater engagement with preventive care is one of the clearest pathways to identifying risk earlier and reducing the high-cost claims that drive much of an organization's medical spend. Those outcomes create the foundation for many of the workforce and organizational goals employers are ultimately trying to achieve.

It’s important to note that every outcome can’t necessarily be measured in a report. Some are reflected in the personal changes employees make for themselves. Cheryl shared a story about an employee who approached her during an event and said, "You changed my life."

This special moment serves as a reminder of what can happen when people are given the support, encouragement, and opportunity to take action themselves.

Awareness is important. Education matters. But lasting outcomes are created when employees move beyond learning and begin doing. 

Audience perspectives

During the webinar, attendees were asked a series of polling questions about the state of wellbeing within their own organizations. Their responses revealed many of the same themes discussed throughout the conversation, including the ongoing challenge of demonstrating business impact, the growing emphasis on mental and emotional wellbeing, and the outcomes leaders most want to see from their wellbeing investments.

The results offer an interesting snapshot of where organizations are focusing their efforts today and where opportunities for growth remain. 

The most common response was difficulty measuring outcomes, followed closely by limited leadership alignment. Together, these responses highlight a challenge many organizations face: proving the value of wellbeing initiatives requires both meaningful data and leadership support.  For HR and benefits leaders, this is the heart of the matter. Without a clear connection between wellbeing efforts and organizational priorities, and without data leaders can bring to the C-suite, building momentum can be difficult.

Mental and emotional wellbeing emerged as the leading area of focus, reflecting the continued importance organizations place on supporting employees through an increasingly complex and demanding work environment. Physical health and preventive care also remained a priority, suggesting that many employers are pursuing a more comprehensive approach to wellbeing rather than focusing on a single dimension.

Lower healthcare costs received the highest number of responses, reinforcing the reality that financial outcomes continue to carry significant weight in leadership discussions. At the same time, responses related to engagement, retention, and workforce performance demonstrate that organizations are increasingly looking beyond cost containment and evaluating wellbeing through a broader business lens. 

The path from wellbeing to business impact

While Nebraska Medicine, Rogue Credit Union, and Hillsborough County each approached wellbeing differently, they arrived at a similar conclusion. Employees are far more likely to engage when wellbeing feels accessible, relevant, and actionable.

For leaders looking to strengthen the business case for wellbeing, the message is clear. Measuring outcomes matters. Tracking engagement matters. But before organizations can realize the full value of their wellbeing investments, employees must first understand what is available, why it matters, and how to take the next step.

Business impact does not happen all at once. It is built through thousands of individual decisions, actions, and behaviors over time. The organizations highlighted in this discussion demonstrate that when wellbeing becomes easier to access, more relevant to employees' lives, and connected to meaningful action, stronger outcomes often follow.

The experiences shared by Nebraska Medicine, Rogue Credit Union, and Hillsborough County highlight just a few of the ways organizations are connecting wellbeing investments to meaningful business outcomes. If you are an HR or benefits leader working to prove the value of wellbeing to your leadership team, you do not have to build that case alone. Download our Workforce Wellbeing Strategy Guide to explore practical strategies, benchmarks, and real-world examples for increasing engagement, improving benefit utilization, and strengthening the business case for wellbeing across large, complex workforces.