Here's an uncomfortable truth: most companies in Southeast Asia are spending more on employee wellness than ever before, yet healthcare costs keep rising by 14% every year. Employees are less healthy, more stressed, and burning out faster.
So what's going wrong?
If you're an HR leader watching your wellness budget disappear with little to show for it, you're not alone. Employee wellness can be effective, but most programmes are fundamentally broken. Let's look at why traditional approaches fail and what actually makes a difference.
Here's the biggest problem with most wellness programmes: they're voluntary. Think about who typically registers for your wellness app or attends your health seminars. It's usually the person who already goes to the gym, eats salads for lunch, and manages stress well. Meanwhile, the employee with undiagnosed diabetes, severe anxiety, or high blood pressure is nowhere to be seen.
This isn't coincidental. The employees who need help most face real barriers:
The numbers tell the story: Naluri’s research shows only 5% of your workforce drives 50% of your medical claims. But voluntary wellness programmes rarely reach this critical 5%. Instead, you're spending money helping people who were already doing fine.
What works better: Proactive outreach that uses health screening data to identify high-risk employees and invites them to participate directly. Instead of hoping someone with prediabetes signs up, you reach out to them specifically: "Your recent screening shows you could benefit from nutrition support. Can we connect you with a dietitian?"
This targeted approach flips the model so you find people who need help rather than waiting for them to find you.
Most wellness programmes are full of impressive-sounding numbers like app downloads or employees attending webinars on stress management. But did anyone actually get healthier?
Downloading an app doesn't reduce blood pressure. Attending a webinar doesn't reverse prediabetes. These activity metrics create an illusion of success while real health problems continue getting worse (and more expensive).
Let's trace a typical employee journey:
Hanna attends a nutrition workshop. She downloads the recommended meal planning app. She returns to her demanding job where she has no time to cook. She continues buying unhealthy street food on the way home for dinner. Two years later, her prediabetes becomes diabetes.
Your wellness report shows Hanna as a "success" because she attended and downloaded. But your claims costs just went up by thousands of dollars per year.
What works better: Measuring clinical outcomes that actually predict cost savings:
Platforms that focus on real outcomes like Naluri can show that 81% of participants achieve at least one clinically significant health improvement within 3-4 months. That's the kind of metric that translates to lower claims costs.
Imagine offering the same wellness resources to both a 25-year-old dealing with career anxiety and a 45-year-old managing diabetes while caring for aging parents. That's exactly what most programmes do, and it's why they fail. Your workforce isn't homogeneous, and their health needs certainly aren't.
What works better: Programmes that assess individual circumstances and provide personalised support. That means matching employees with coaches who understand their specific situation, offering culturally relevant dietary advice (not just translated Western meal plans), and addressing the actual stressors they face daily.
Most organisations have employee health data scattered across multiple systems that don't talk to each other: HR has demographic information, insurance has claims data, your wellness vendor has participation metrics, and occupational health has screening results.
Without connecting these dots, you're missing crucial patterns. You can't identify which employees are at highest risk, whether your wellness investments are working, or where problems are emerging before they become expensive crises.
The data you do see is usually backward-looking. Claims data tells you someone developed diabetes after they've already got an expensive chronic condition. What you need are early warning signs: patterns that predict who's likely to develop diabetes in the next year so you can intervene while prevention is still possible.
What works better: Integrated platforms that connect health screening data, claims patterns, and engagement information to identify risk before it becomes a crisis. AI can analyse anonymised patterns to spot emerging issues: is financial stress spiking in a particular department, or are burnout indicators rising amongst mid-level managers?
This visibility lets you act proactively rather than reactively.
Effective wellness programmes share four characteristics that traditional approaches lack:
Implementing wellness programmes that genuinely help employees improve their health (both mental and physical) is possible when you look for these elements. And the impact to the business is compounded: not just improved health and lower claims, but also improved productivity through reduced absenteeism and presenteeism. Estimates suggest that every dollar invested in wellness generates 6X ROI. Escalating healthcare costs aren't inevitable, the question is whether you'll keep doing what's comfortable but ineffective, or look for programmes that demonstrably work.
Read our white paper The New Economics of Workplace Wellness in Southeast Asia for detailed data, ROI frameworks, and a comprehensive vendor evaluation guide.