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What goes wrong in wellness program implementations.

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  • Last Updated on September 17, 2026
  • 10 mins
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Day one of a new wellness program always looks great. By week two, curious signups have moved on and the client’s champion has too. Nobody watches return visits, only enrollment, so the number stays high until the 90-day report lands flat, because the program has been dying since week two.

We sat down with Samantha Levin, wellness program manager at Wellness360, to talk about why workplace wellness programs quietly fail within their first 90 days, and what she’d do differentlyWhy wellness programs die in the first 90 days  

Where companies land on the wrong definition of wellness

Almost every RFP starts from the same place: a benefits renewal came in high, or a competitor just announced a new wellness perk, and someone in HR has six weeks to bring a plan to leadership. As a vendor, we get handed a scope built around what will look good in that deck, not around what the workforce actually needs, because no one had time to ask. She sat in scoping calls where the entire brief was “we need something like what this competitor has.” That’s the whole strategy.

Our job is supposed to be pushing back on that brief before we build against it. Vendors who don’t, who just say yes and start configuring, are setting the client up to fail before the contract even signs. Defining goals at the start is really the beginning of getting to a real definition of wellness, because everyone’s definition is different. A lot of the time, companies go wrong by copying a competitor instead of asking what their own people need.

The most expensive mistake she’s watched a client make was a six-figure spend on a fully customized incentives and rewards catalog: physical merchandise, a branded on-site kickoff event, on top of platform fees. The pitch internally was that it would signal serious investment in employees. What never got budgeted was who would keep the catalog fresh, who would restock incentives, or who would own communications past the launch quarter. Within two quarters the catalog looked exactly like it had on day one, because no one had the budget or bandwidth left to touch it. That’s usually the moment it gets real: the invoice is fully spent, the usage graph is flat, and someone has to explain the gap to their own leadership.

The metrics that lie, and the ones that don’t

One piece of advice she’s come to disagree with is that more engagement channels equal more engagement. She used to build on that assumption too: more notifications, more email touch points, more nudges across more channels. What actually happens is the client adds more channels while chasing a flat usage number, and it does nothing except increase how many messages employees ignore before they mute the whole thing. The programs that actually hold engagement usually do less, not more, and what they send ties to something an employee asked for, not something built because it could be.

She also worked with a client who hit their enrollment target within the first month, which read as a clean win in the kickoff report. Signups were the number everyone tracked because it was easy to report on quarterly review calls. Nobody was tracking return visits. The number in the success story and what employees were actually doing were two different things. No one was being dishonest, signups are just the easiest number to produce by a deadline, and it’s usually whoever owns the client relationship, not whoever owns the outcome, who decides which number gets reported.

The first thing to look at to tell the difference is return usage, not first-touch usage. Any decent launch email gets a big number. What tells you something real is whether the same employees come back a second and third time without a fresh reminder pushing them. If usage flatlines the week notifications pause, that’s not engagement, that’s a well-run reminder system wearing engagement’s clothes. Second, ask the HR contact to describe in one sentence what the employee actually thinks the program is for. If they can’t answer that clearly, employees can’t either, and no dashboard number will change that.

Building a 90-day plan that actually works

If starting over with one company on a 90-day timeline, week one wouldn’t involve configuring anything. It would mean getting in front of actual employees, not just their HR team, and asking what’s genuinely making their week harder, not what wellness benefits they think they’re supposed to want. Week two, take whatever came up most often and build one small, specific response to it, not a full program rollout. If burnout keeps coming up, that’s the one thing to build toward first, not a company-wide challenge.

What she’d refuse to spend that window on is a fully branded portal or a merchandise-driven launch event, because those signal effort to leadership without producing any actual behavior change. In a 90-day window there’s no room to waste on things that only look good in a screenshot. Start by understanding employees’ needs and goals, and how to sustain that long term, then build out from there.

On whether this failure sits more with the buyer or the vendor, she’d put more of it on the vendor side, including platforms like ours, because vendors can’t control the pitch or the roadmap on their own, a client’s HR team is working from what we tell them a platform can do. But it also sits with the buyer: it’s up to them to tell us their goals from day one, since we configure the platform around what they say they want. The vendor builds the roadmap and produces what the buyer asks for, but it’s the buyer who has to be upfront about their real goals so we can build toward the right long-term outcome.

What failure looks like from the employee's desk

From the employee’s desk, a failing program looks like endless clicking, having to click five or six times just to do one simple task. It looks like slow loading, screens that freeze or take too long to open while the task keeps piling up. It looks like a confusing layout, buttons hidden in strange places, text that’s small and hard to read. And it looks like too many passwords, having to log in over and over, when something like SSO would let you type in an email and be logged in right away.

From the employee’s desk, a failing program looks like endless clicking, having to click five or six times just to do one simple task. It looks like slow loading, screens that freeze or take too long to open while the task keeps piling up. It looks like a confusing layout, buttons hidden in strange places, text that’s small and hard to read. And it looks like too many passwords, having to log in over and over, when something like SSO would let you type in an email and be logged in right away.

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