Picture the scene…
Your company has a gym benefit. It's a subsidised membership to one specific gym chain — probably the one with a branch near the head office that someone in leadership uses.
Great news if you're in the city centre five days a week. Considerably less useful if you're hybrid, fully remote, live somewhere outside Zone 2, or simply don't want to do the same three machines everyone else does.
For years, this was how corporate fitness benefits worked. And for years, employees quietly didn't use them — or used them for the first two weeks of January and then quietly stopped. After all, those New Year’s Resolutions aren’t the easiest to keep, right?
That model is finally on its way out. And honestly? Good riddance.
The way people work has changed beyond recognition, and benefits haven't always kept pace. According to our research, 87% of businesses currently allow employees to work from home at least some of the time. A fitness benefit tied to a single gym's locations is already excluding a chunk of your workforce before a single person has signed up.
And even the return-to-office push hasn't reversed this. Employees are more geographically spread than they were pre-pandemic — people moved, commutes changed, the idea that your entire workforce is within a 10-minute walk of the same leisure centre is a comfortable fiction most benefits packages are still quietly telling themselves.
But location is only part of it. There's also the question of what people actually want from physical activity — which, it turns out, is not one thing. One employee wants to lift weights. Another wants yoga, or Pilates, or a swimming pool, or a climbing wall, or a spin class at 6am before anyone else is awake. A one-size-fits-all perk assumes all of these people have identical needs. They don't. And increasingly, employees aren't willing to pretend otherwise.
Our research backs this up: 55% of employees say they'd be more likely to exercise if their employer offered a discounted gym membership or passes to classes. The demand is there. The question is whether what you're offering is actually flexible enough to capture it.
There's another elephant in the room worth acknowledging.
Gym memberships are one of the first things to go when household budgets come under pressure — and after a prolonged squeeze on UK finances, a lot of employees have quietly let theirs lapse and not gone back. Not because they don't want to be healthier, but because paying £50–£80 a month for a gym they might use twice a week feels like a luxury they can't quite justify.
72% of employees in our research said the cost-of-living crisis has changed their outlook on what matters in a job. Financial support and tangible savings have moved firmly up the priority list. A fitness benefit that makes exercise genuinely more affordable — real savings on something they actually want — lands completely differently from one that offers nominal access to a provider they'll never use.
The design of the benefit matters as much as the benefit itself. In the current climate, flexibility and affordability aren't nice-to-haves. They're the difference between something your employees engage with and something that quietly collects dust.
This is exactly what Epassi’s GymFlex and MyGymDiscounts are built for. Together, we give employees discounted access to the UK's largest fitness network — thousands of gyms, leisure centres, studios and classes to choose from — so every employee can find and join the one that works for them, wherever they are, and whatever their idea of exercise actually looks like.GymFlex operates through salary sacrifice, meaning employees secure exclusive corporate savings spread the cost over 12 months.
The result is a fitness benefit that actually works. For the person in the city centre and the one working from home in a market town. For the weightlifter and the yoga enthusiast. From the employees that work out in their front room and the ones that visit the swimming pool. And what’s better, partners can access the savings too.
One size fits none. Fortunately, you don't have to offer one size anymore.
Find out more about GymFlex and MyGymDiscounts here.