What years of coaching onsite taught me about the 20% problem
Most wellness programs reach a fifth of the people who pay for them. The reason isn't motivation, and it isn't the app.
When I started coaching inside companies, I assumed the hard part would be the programming: what to prescribe, how to progress someone who has never trained, how to write a plan for a person who sits for nine hours a day. Years in, the programming is the easy part. The hard part is getting the same person to walk back into the room in week nine.
The published numbers say the same thing less politely. The U.S. Department of Labor's review of workplace wellness programs found median participation around 20 percent at employers who offered no incentive, rising to roughly 40 percent where incentives were used. RAND, looking at actual participation records rather than survey answers at a large employer, landed in the same band: 20 to 40 percent of eligible people take part in a given year. If you read those figures as a motivation problem, you will spend money on prizes and reminders. If you read them as a design problem, you change the program.
Discovery is not a delivery model
Most wellness programs are built to be found. There is a portal, a benefit that appears in an onboarding deck, a stipend that shows up in payroll, a challenge that runs in October. All of it requires the employee to go looking, decide alone, and then keep going alone.
That is a lot to ask of someone who is already behind on their work. Every one of those steps is a place where a normal, busy person quietly drops out, and none of them are visible in the vendor's monthly report.
The onsite version inverts the order. The program arrives: at a set day, at a set time, in a room people already walk past. Someone with a name is expecting them. The only decision left is whether to stand up.
What the people who do show up have in common
I have watched a few hundred people start. The ones who stay are rarely the ones who were already fit, and they are almost never the ones who asked the most questions upfront. They have three things in common, and none of them are character traits.
They had a slot that fit their week. They knew what the first session would be. And somebody asked them by name in the first two weeks.
That last one is worth pausing on. A calendar invite from a stranger is easy to decline. A coach who says "you're Jordan, you sit with the platform team, I've got 20 minutes on Thursday and I'd like to use it on your lower back" is much harder to decline, because it is specific to them.
The three variables that decide everything
Strip away the branding and every wellness program comes down to time, place and person.
Time. If a session requires a commute, a change of clothes, a shower and a commute back, you have built a two-hour commitment and called it 45 minutes. It will lose to a deadline every time.
Place. A room three floors away is fine. A gym across the street is not, because the friction isn't distance. It's the decision to leave the building in the middle of the day.
Person. The same coach, on the same days, for months. Not a rotating cast, not a hotline, not an app. Someone whose name the team learns and who learns theirs.
Get those three wrong and no incentive fixes it. Get them right and you don't need the incentive.
What it looks like in a working week
At Field AI, the engagement runs on fixed days. Coaching hours are blocked in the calendar and booked ahead, so nobody spends Tuesday morning hunting for a coach who may or may not be free. Sessions are short by design: 25 minutes is enough to coach a habit properly, and short enough that a person can take the slot between meetings without rearranging their day.
Group sessions sit outside the coaching hours, so attending Stretch and Roll doesn't cost somebody their one-to-one slot. New hires get a standing invitation in their first two weeks, before the first crunch, because the first month is when a habit is cheapest to start.
None of that is clever. It is just specific.
Count the right thing
Most programs report sign-ups. Sign-ups are a launch metric, not a result. What I want to know, and what I show a client, is a plainer number: of the people who started, how many were still showing up at 90 days, and how many have a written plan they can run without me in the room.
That second number matters more than attendance. Somebody who trains twice a week on their own and checks in monthly is a better outcome than somebody who attends every session and does nothing in between.
The question I would ask before signing
If you are evaluating a program, ask one thing first: who is the coach, what days will they be here, and what room will they use? If the answer is vague, the delivery will be vague. If the answer is a name, two days and a room number, you are probably looking at a program that will still be running in month seven.
The twenty percent is not a law of nature. It is what you get when participation depends on people finding you.