Inclusive Lifestyle Benefits: Wellbeing for Employees
15 April 2025
Friday, 18th April, is National Exercise Day, a campaign dedicated to promoting the health and lifestyle benefits of regular exercise. When considering your employee wellbeing strategy, you must ensure your fitness discounts and benefits are inclusive, catering to all needs and abilities. Read on to discover how to help employees make positive lifestyle choices.
We all know the benefits of making positive lifestyle choices - getting enough sleep, eating well, and embracing more activity and movement do wonders for our emotional, mental and physical health.
As an employer, you play a role in making exercise more affordable by focusing on physical health when planning your employee benefits packages. Lifestyle benefits for employees form part of a physical wellbeing strategy that focuses on prevention, so it’s vital to make them accessible to all employees.
Preventative wellbeing strategies create a healthier workforce = more motivation and engagement + less absenteeism.
What Are the Social Benefits of a Healthy Lifestyle?
We’re intrinsically social beings, so you should never forget that your fitness lifestyle benefits can help employees make new connections. Employees working remotely or predominantly from home often say social connection is what they miss the most about being in the office.
It’s just not quite the same when it’s over a screen.
When your employees make new social connections through exercise, whether that’s the gym, a cycling or walking club, yoga or even golf, they’re more likely to stick with it. This connection inspires them to make positive lifestyle choices, boosting their happiness and health.
What are Fringe Lifestyle Benefits?
We break down all you need to know about fringe benefits in our blog, ‘What Are Fringe Benefits for Employees?’, including a section on our discounted gym memberships. Read that blog to explore how to embed this fitness lifestyle benefit for employees into your business.
In a nutshell, a fringe benefit is something you offer above the monthly salary, but doesn’t have to be monetary.
With lifestyle benefits for employees, a discounted or funded gym membership, a healthcare plan, and free onsite exercise classes, are all non-monetary wellbeing (fringe) benefits.
Popular Fitness Solutions to Embed in Your Employee Benefits Packages
You'll likely be aware of the two main fitness-related employee benefits - Gym Memberships and Cycle to Work Salary Sacrifice Schemes. Here at Pluxee UK, we can add a few more…
With SmartPay, our salary deduction scheme, employees can spread the cost of at-home gym equipment or the kit they need for their hobbies. We have our Employee Discounts Platform, which gives employees up to 20% discount with over 100 retailers - including sporting retailers and fitness brands.
Choice… that’s where we’re going with this.
To be inclusive, you have to give employees the choice to pursue fitness in a way that appeals to them, regardless of their abilities. The variety and flexibility of the available discounts ensure an inclusive approach, increasing the uptake of your employee benefits offering, thus making it more cost-effective.
For this article, we’re taking the inclusive conversation further by focusing on the two ‘core’ fitness lifestyle benefits: Discounted Gym Memberships and our salary sacrifice bike-to-work scheme.
Gym & Fitness Discounts
42% of Brits cut their gym membership to afford the rising cost of living. The Mental Health Foundation suggests that as a nation, we’re exercising 12% less often than we used to.
As we explore in our blog, 'Boost Engagement with Your Employee Benefit Offering', statistics suggest that those aged 25 to 40 are more likely to have a gym membership. However, there are now five generations working side by side in the workplace, making it necessary to please a diverse demographic.
Our Discounted Gym Memberships are an inclusive fitness benefit because we haven't limited the offers to the traditional gym environment.
While the aim is to get employees more active, our Corporate Gym Membership is an employee benefit that includes all interests and abilities. The treadmill isn’t for everyone, and classes aren’t always running at a convenient time. Whether your people prefer to get their physical boost out in nature or from the comfort of their living room, with over 3,000 gyms, studios, fitness centres, boot camps and sports clubs across the UK and the Republic of Ireland - employees are spoilt for choice.
Cycle to Work Salary Sacrifice Scheme
Our Cycle to Work salary sacrifice scheme has many selling points. It's an impactful, salary-stretching employee benefit that also helps you become a socially conscious employer.
We’ve gone in-depth on the topic of our Cycle Benefit scheme in our blog, ‘How Cycle to Work Schemes Work and Why They Matter’, and you can also listen to our podcast featured above, which tells you all you need to know, and is split into two parts.
We don’t want to duplicate content on how it all works, but we will give you some highlights of our cycle benefit scheme below:
- Employees make NIC and tax savings.
- Employers make NIC savings.
- There are accessible options for all abilities.
- Hybrid and remote workers are eligible to apply.
- We have solutions for lower earners.
- We handle most of the admin and marketing for you.
We’ll touch on some of these points next when we dig deeper into what makes both fitness benefits inclusive.
Making Fitness Lifestyle Benefits Inclusive
For a benefit to be inclusive, it must be something that all employees can access, regardless of age, ability, preferences, budget or location.
A Focus on Our Discounted Gym Memberships
You’ve read that we have many choices for how employees can take advantage of our Gym Membership Benefit; now, we’ll explore why they’re inclusive.
Hybrid & Remote Workers
58% of UK workers prefer to work in a hybrid model (The Home Office Life). Flexible contracts have become the norm in many organisations, allowing employees to choose where and when they work.
We often hear about gyms contacting businesses in their area to offer discounted memberships. As much as we love to see local businesses supporting one another, this approach may no longer benefit the employees.
When the workforce was in the office five days a week, they could use the local gym before or after work and during lunch breaks. However, will those same employees drive thirty minutes or more to the gym near their office if they’re predominantly working from home?
Probably not. Especially if there’s a gym closer to home.
That’s why we’ve partnered with some of the UK’s largest fitness franchises to form our Gym Benefit, which gives employees up to 25% off membership fees at their choice of location.
Confidence & Personalities
Gym anxiety is a real issue for some people. Statistics show that 60% of people feel anxious about going to the gym for the first time, and 32% feel intimidated exercising next to someone fitter than them (Muscle and Brawn). The gym or group class environment isn’t for everyone, regardless of where they are on their fitness journey.
When you embed our Corporate Gym Memberships into your business, your people will get access to our vast range of digital fitness partners, giving them discounted subscriptions to online workout programmes with some of the biggest names and brands in the business.
Time & Convenience
36% of the population feel that there simply isn’t enough time in their day to exercise (Pure Gym).
Those already entrenched in the fitness lifestyle would consider lack of time an excuse, but it’s a valid issue for many people. Working parents, for example, already have a juggle on their hands. Those living in the countryside may need to drive a considerable distance to reach their nearest gym. A thirty-minute drive each way makes a one-hour workout a two-hour activity.
Understandably, not everyone can spare this amount of time regularly.
Go out for a run! I hear you cry. Except that high-impact sports aren’t suitable for everyone. Lack of time is why the digital fitness and online workout programmes are such beneficial features of our Corporate Gym Membership. Employees can choose a programme that suits their bodies and abilities and find a convenient time to fit in their workout.
A Focus on Our Salary Sacrifice Bike to Work Scheme
We refer to our cycle salary sacrifice scheme as our Cycle Benefit Scheme, to move away from the belief that you can only participate if you cycle to the office daily. So, let’s explore what makes the activity and benefit inclusive.
Hybrid & Remote Workers
One of the myths around the Cycle to Work Scheme is that the employee must cycle all the way to work. However, employees who commute via train, for example, can still apply for the scheme if they use the bike to travel to the train station because it forms part of their journey.
Those working from home may wish to make their local coffee shop their workspace for half a day or a base for meetings, and yes - this is a valid reason for applying for a bike! The scheme has evolved, and there’s no expectation for an employer to check how their employees are using their bikes, meaning they can switch petrol power for pedal power as often as they like.
Confidence & Personalities
Employees can cycle alone or in groups, but it’s often the social element of cycling that appeals to people, especially if they’re new to biking and need more confidence. It’s a mixed-ability, inclusive activity from which employees can reap physical, mental, and financial benefits.
A top tip revealed during our podcast, Cycle to Work, Cycle for Life: From Commute to Community, is that some employers use the NIC savings their scheme generates to fund cycle training programmes to help employees feel confident and safe on the roads.
Time & Convenience
Whether your employees are hybrid or office-based, whenever they use their bike to commute to work instead of their car, they get an exercise session - twice a day! When employees make cycling part of their daily lives, exercise becomes part of their routine, meaning they don’t need to carve out time for a dedicated workout - unless they want to.
The average journey in the UK is five miles, so there are plenty of opportunities for your employees to leave the car on the drive.
Make Physical Wellbeing for Employees a Top Priority with Pluxee UK
According to research by Pure Gym, 64% of people in the UK feel they don’t look after their health as much as they should. Employers can make exercise affordable again with our extensive and inclusive range of employee benefits.
Let’s make those positive lifestyle choices affordable, make active travel more enjoyable, and make inclusive fitness lifestyle benefits a part of your workplace culture.
Sources: The Home Office Life, Muscle and Brawn, Pure Gym.
