Corporate Gym Memberships — a benefit for the few, or universally appealing?

We’ve partnered with DataHub to analyse hundreds of thousands of gym memberships in an industry first report.

Gym memberships have a very important role to play in the battle against physical inactivity. This is without doubt — every month, people use gym memberships as their way to maintain or improve their fitness. I am one of them. As commented on in a recent Health Club Magazine editorial, the sector needs to be delivering sensible, evidence-supported advice to consumers, signposting them to relevant options to be active, not peddling clichéd rhetoric that plays on people’s suspicions or cultural fads. [finishes rant]

Businesses in particular have an important role to play in helping their employees to be more active, a fact finally acknowledge by Government in the recent policy statement that “Prevention is Better than Cure”. Employers of all shapes and sizes represent an underused channel to reach a large proportion of the population, and as I’ve spoken about previously, this is going to be an important part of any future strategy to get the nation more active.

Many businesses recognise this, and offer perks and incentives to employees to be active, the most common of which is a subsidised (or “corporate”) gym membership. The key question I want to answer: How well are corporate gym memberships actually used by those that have access to them?

However, little publicly available data exists to answer this question. Which surprised me — this must be a prominent question for every business owner or benefits manager who (a) cares about the physical health of employees, and (b) is funding membership subsidies, and therefore would want to know how well their investment is being used.

Not one to be defeated so easily, we partnered with 4global’s DataHub team to conduct the analysis ourselves. (DataHub is the largest repository for sport and leisure data in the UK, integrated and enhanced through a suite of participation and business intelligence modules, accessed anywhere via a single online portal — with the aim of getting the nation more active and healthier by sharing up to date intelligence, so those investing within the sector can make more informed decisions).

Together with the DataHub team, we analysed hundreds of thousands of gym memberships from 2018*. Here’s what we found:

Finding 1: Those who have corporate gym memberships tend to keep them.

Using a cohort of 270,000 gym memberships over a 10 month period in 2018, corporate memberships make up approximately 2% of all memberships — i.e. it’s a small fraction of members for any given gym.

Looking at the same cohort, corporate memberships have a relatively impressive retention rate — they are the third longest membership type (after the “Full” and “Golf” categories) and have almost double the average retention across all membership types. This shows those who have corporate memberships tend to keep them.

But are these corporate memberships actually used?

Finding 2: Those who have corporate gym memberships tend to use them.

On the face of it, corporate memberships are used well, with an average usage of 5.2 visits per month, when analysing those corporate members that used their memberships at least once in the year. This is over once a week on average, and is 15% higher than the equivalent figure for non-corporate memberships. (Also, 63% of all corporate memberships are used by women, which is great news for funders like Sport England who are prioritising getting more women and girls active with campaigns like This Girl Can).

Is this the whole story?

Finding 3: However, it’s a tale of two halves — it works really well for some, and not very well for others.

Looking over the 12 months of 2018, 24% of corporate gym memberships were never used. That’s to say that even though the employee initially signed up, and the employer or benefits platform can positively report that the employee is now benefiting from a “healthy perk”, almost 1 in 4 corporate memberships aren’t used at all, but the employer or employee is still paying.

It gets more interesting if we split out the corporate gym membership stats by number of visits per year per member, from 0 visits/year to 12 visits/year (i.e. once a month), and 12+ visits per year:

There’s a clear divide of those that really enjoy going to the gym (the 12+ visits per year group on the far right) and everyone else (i.e. those that probably try but struggle to form a repeating habit). The analysis shows that, on average:

• 55% of corporate memberships are used once a month or less
• 44% used once every other month or less
• 36% used once every three months or less

The 12+ times a year group are clearly the people where the gym membership offer has truly hit home. This group represents 44% of all corporate memberships. What’s staggering is that for this group, the average usage rate is 8.5 visits per month. Compare that to the highest usage of 1 visit per month for the remaining 56% of corporate gym members, and you can clearly see that there is indeed a core market for corporate gym memberships, but it’s the minority.

Compounding this issue is the fact that not all employees who are offered corporate gym membership benefits will sign up. A study from 2016 by Vitality / Rand showed that across 169 employers offering discounted gym membership to staff, only 8% of ~34,000 employees took it up. However, the same study did also note the awareness of the benefit was a significant issue, with only 28.8% of staff knowing that such an offer was available to them.

In summary: up to 44% of employees that have a corporate gym membership actually make the most of it through repeated use. It’s the right product for them. But that leaves the remaining employees: a combination of the remaining 56% of those with a corporate gym membership, and the majority of the workforce that never signed up in the first place. This is a huge group that needs to be served better by employers wanting to offer ways for employees to live healthier; why limit benefits offered to something that’s only statistically likely to adequately serve less than a small fraction of the workforce?

The physical activity sector has so much to offer this group of underserved employees, and businesses have the channels to engage them. To improve on the current offer, we need to do two things:

(1) better engage, motivate and incentivise those with corporate memberships to use the facilities and classes available to them;

(2) provide choice and flexibility beyond the current standard gym membership offer.

If businesses start to do these things, the lives of millions of employees across the country can be truly impacted. To do nothing is to leave millions of employees underserved and under-supported in their health goals.

This study shows that these corporate gym benefits are very good perks for a not insignificant proportion of employees. This isn’t about undermining the role played by corporate gym memberships. It is still a very worthwhile and valuable benefit to offer your employees. But corporate gym memberships alone are not enough to meet the demands of your workforce; indeed, the data shows it’s not likely to meet anything close to the the majority of your workforce’s needs.

So if you really do care about the wellbeing of your employees, start thinking more broadly about additional offers over and above traditional services. We’d love to help.

*Note: DataHub member data is predominantly from “leisure operators”, i.e. those organisations primarily running publicly funded leisure centres. In this article, I’ve drawn conclusions that seem reasonable from the data available, in order to start a conversation in the sector. If you have data you can add to this discussion, we’d love to broaden the analysis.

imin is an emerging technology in the sector, connect workforces, wherever they are, to any physical activity they choose, from within any wellbeing or benefits platform. We believe delivering the power of choice for physical activity can transform the health of the nation. See how we can help you today.