The download numbers look great. What happens after the first week is another story.
Wellbeing apps are the easiest thing in the world to buy. One contract, one rollout email, a line in the benefits pack. For a stretched HR team they look like the responsible choice: something for everyone, available any time, at a modest price per head.
The trouble starts when you ask what they change.
What the evidence says.
In 2024 the Oxford researcher William Fleming published one of the largest studies of its kind. He looked at more than 46,000 workers across 233 UK organisations, comparing people who took part in individual-level wellbeing offers with colleagues who didn’t. The offers included wellbeing apps, mindfulness, resilience and stress management training, and relaxation classes.
The result: no evidence that participants were any better off.
The study is cross-sectional, so it can’t prove these things never help anyone. What it shows is that, across a very large sample, the people using them weren’t measurably doing better than the people who weren’t. For something bought to improve wellbeing at scale, that’s a hard finding to ignore.
The retention problem.
Then there’s whether people use them at all. A widely cited analysis of mental health apps found median 30-day retention of just 3.3%. That figure comes from consumer data, so workplace numbers will vary, but the pattern is familiar to anyone who has looked at their own usage dashboard: a healthy spike in launch week, then a long, quiet tail.
Employers notice. In the CIPD’s 2025 survey, “employees don’t engage with activities” was the second biggest wellbeing challenge organisations face, behind only finding the budget.
Why it doesn’t land.
There’s no mystery here, and nobody is doing anything wrong by trying. Individual-level offers share a design flaw: they ask a tired person to fix themselves, alone, in their own time, using the same evenings and lunch breaks the job has already eaten into.
Meanwhile, nothing about the working day changes. The meetings still run back to back. The inbox still fills overnight. The manager is still running on fumes. A 10-minute meditation is a nice thing to do before walking straight back into the conditions that made it necessary.
There’s a physiological point too. A nervous system stuck on alert finds it hard to sit still and observe itself. For many people, being asked to meditate while stressed is like being asked to relax by someone shouting “relax”. The practice is fine. The timing and setting are wrong.
Where the money works harder.
The same research pattern that shows weak returns for individual add-ons shows stronger returns for organisation-wide approaches. Deloitte’s analysis finds earlier, whole-organisation work returns more than late-stage, individual support.
In practice that looks like:
Shared practice. Things teams do together, in work time, which changes norms as well as individuals.
Built into the day. A few minutes at the start of a meeting rather than an app to open at 10pm.
Body before mind. Practices that change state directly, such as slow breathing, before asking people to reflect.
Managers first. Because a regulated manager changes the room for everyone else.
Fix the work too. Workload is the top cause of stress-related absence. No app can shrink an inbox.
Breath fits that profile well. Slow breathing, around 6 breaths a minute, is linked to more parasympathetic activity and lower anxiety, and it doesn’t require anyone to sit still and empty their mind. It can be done as a team, in work time, in minutes.
This opens a series on where wellbeing spend leaks. If you missed it, start with what poor mental health is costing you.
The Working Well assessment shows you where your organisation sits and what dysregulation is likely costing you. Your Working Well briefing, with the full cost model, follows by email.
Take the Working Well assessment today. workerbe.co.uk/working-well
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