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WHY MACORVA
Employee wellness continues to be one of the fastest-growing priorities for employers, driven by a growing body of research connecting well-being to business performance. The global corporate wellness market is valued at $75 billion in 2025, projected to reach $129.5 billion by 2034. That growth is real, but it's only part of the story. Here's what the latest findings say about where wellness programs are working, where they're falling short, and what's closing the distance between what employers offer and what employees can use.
Wellness as a Driver of Engagement
Wellness and engagement move together, and the newest numbers make the connection hard to miss. 54% of employees felt fulfilled by their work in 2025, up from 40% the year before. That jump lines up with employers' expanded investment in well-being support over the same period.
The connection only holds if organizations act on what employees tell them. Tracking an engagement score tells a company where it stands. It does nothing on its own to move the number. Moving it means working on the drivers behind it, which our guide to employee engagement breaks down in full. Wellness programs are a direct lever because they reach several of the biggest drivers at once: workload, burnout, and whether employees feel supported day to day. The same three conditions produce workplace stress, which is why engagement and stress rise and fall together.
Giving Your Employees a Voice in the Workplace
Managing Work-Related Stress
Stress is one of the clearest drivers of disengagement, and for a large share of the workforce it is a daily condition. Nearly a third of U.S. workers (31%) say their job creates stress "always or often," and 22% report job-related anxiety at a similar frequency, according to SHRM's 2025 Pulse Survey. Employees point to a specific, consistent set of causes:
- Excessive workload (37%)
- Insufficient pay (33%)
- Understaffing (31%)
- Ineffective management (29%)
In other words, a large share of workplace stress originates in how work is structured and managed, not only in how individual employees cope with it. Programs built around personal coping skills, such as mindfulness resources or stress management workshops, are necessary but incomplete on their own. The organizations seeing measurable improvement tend to pair that individual support with changes to staffing levels and management practices.
Support that stops at a policy doesn't reduce stress. It just changes who is being asked to cope with it. Left unaddressed, workplace stress doesn't stay contained. It spills into mental health, which is often where unmanaged pressure shows up first.
Mental Health and Holistic Well-Being
Unmanaged stress compounds into something larger over time. Three in four U.S. workers say they've experienced at least one mental health challenge in the past year, and more than a third say it happens often. Employers have expanded coverage in response. The share of employers offering mental health benefits rose from 84% in 2019 to 90% in 2024, according to SHRM's 2024 Employee Benefits Survey.
Coverage and support aren't the same thing, though, and employees are the ones drawing that distinction. More than nine in ten employees (92%) say well-being should be supported through day-to-day work practices, according to the American Heart Association's (AHA) 2026 Voice of the Employee survey. In other words, a line item in a benefits guide doesn't meet that standard. That's a real departure from how wellness programs have traditionally been built: as a menu of benefits to select during open enrollment, rather than something woven into how work gets done.
The difference between offering support and building it into the workday is where most wellness programs now succeed or fall short. Employee demand keeps rising, and employers are expanding what they offer in response. Whether a bigger program closes the distance or just adds another unused benefit to the list depends on how directly it reaches daily work.
Demand Keeps Growing, and So Does the Gap in Delivery
The AHA found that nine in ten employees would welcome more support managing their health, and 95% are actively trying to improve their own well-being despite rising costs and work intensity. Employees don't need a program to tell them wellness matters. They're asking for help with something they're already doing on their own.
Employers aren't holding back on commitments either. Business Group on Health's 2025 survey of 131 global employers found that 93% plan to maintain or expand well-being offerings in 2025. Mental health is included in every respondent's strategy, physical health in 99%, and financial health in 92%, with financial health expected to reach 100% by 2026. Another 59% are increasing their focus on social determinants of health such as housing, food security, and transportation, factors that shape health far outside the workplace.
The real gap isn't commitment. It's access. More than four in five employees (84%) report challenges navigating the benefits already available to them, which means programs are expanding faster than employees' ability to use them. Fixing that starts with asking employees directly what they need and where they get stuck. If you haven't reviewed what your wellness survey is asking, our guide to the 9 factors every wellness survey should cover is a reasonable place to start.
Find your wellness gaps and fix them to retain your best talent
Measuring ROI and VOI for Wellness Programs
Demonstrating the value of a wellness program is still essential, though a single ROI figure no longer tells the full story. Early wellness research tied value almost entirely to healthcare cost reduction and lower absenteeism, and that framing still matters. What it misses is retention, engagement, and culture, none of which show up directly on a healthcare cost line. They are also the outcomes most employers are investing in wellness to improve, which makes leaving them out of the measurement a strange choice.
That's why most organizations now track Value on Investment (VOI) alongside traditional ROI. ROI answers whether a program paid for itself. VOI answers whether it changed how people experience working there, which tends to be the better predictor of whether a program survives the next budget cycle. We cover how to build both into a single model in Evaluating ROI for Employee Wellness Programs: Updated Insights for 2025.
Where AI Fits Into Wellness Programs
Employees want more support, employers are committing more money, and the two still aren't connecting. That is the opening AI-powered tools are starting to fill. Nearly three in four employees (73%) say they're interested in more AI-powered health solutions from their employer, though only 28% currently use any AI tools for their health, per the AHA.
A 45-point difference between interest and use is hard to explain away. Employees aren't waiting to be convinced that AI-powered support is worth having. They're waiting for employers to provide it. Macorva EX exists to close that distance, turning employee feedback into real-time, personalized action instead of a static policy sitting in a handbook. See how Macorva EX works, or request a demo to see it applied to your own data.
Heading Into 2027
Wellness programs going into 2027 aren’t short on budget or good intentions. They’re short on reach. Employees have been clear about what they want: support that shows up in the workday instead of a benefits portal, staffing and management that don’t create the stress a program is meant to relieve, and tools that make existing benefits easier to use. Employers that listen will spend less on adding programs and more on making current ones usable. They’ll also measure wellness by whether it changes how people experience their work, not only by what it saves. The organizations that close the distance between what they offer and what employees can use will be the ones with the engagement numbers to show for it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Editors note: this blog was originally published in February 2021 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
