Inside Roblox’s push to make its employees healthier

Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) have long been recommended to help patients manage treatment for diabetes.

But in recent years the medical tools have caught the attention of a larger cohort of folks who are interested in carefully tracking how certain behaviors, such as eating and exercising, can affect their overall health.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki admitted he was hooked on the wellness trend during an April interview with Fortune, telling the outlet he wears a CGM to track his sugar intake “at times,” adding, “I highly recommend CGMs for everyone.”

Now Baszucki—who also invests in research tied to this trend—is working on evangelizing his own employees to be CGM converts. He recently announced on X that Roblox would cover a one-month CGM subscription for employees, along with one-on-one health coaching sessions.

How Roblox will cover CGMs. Roblox created a fund to give employees an option to purchase the tool themselves, and charge it to an account managed by the company, said Supriya Bahri, Roblox’s VP of total rewards and people operations. CGMs typically cost $1,000 or more without insurance.

With a CGM, employees should be able to gain an understanding of how their bodies are responding “to food, to exercise, to stress,” she said. From there, they can “build a personalized plan” with a health coach, which Roblox also subsidizes.

CGMs are just the latest offering in a wider program Roblox has developed to optimize employees’ health, Bahri explained. Other benefits that fall under this category include biometric screenings and DEXA scans—a bone density test—that workers can undergo at the office. The San Mateo, California-based company also recently adopted a “nutritional philosophy” to guide its meal and snack offerings.

Before restocking its office kitchens, Bahri and her colleagues met with nutritional experts, scholars, and even the coach of the San Francisco 49ers, to understand how they could promote better metabolic health in the workplace, she said. They landed on offerings that promote “whole foods” and “good energy”; anything that was highly processed or had a high amount of sugar was replaced “with more expensive, but healthier, organic snacks,” she said.

The ROI on healthy workers. Roblox has labeled these types of health benefits as “proactive.” Whereas many companies focus on health support for employees after they develop certain chronic conditions, Roblox aims to get ahead of that by encouraging employees to take control of their health before this happens, Bahri explained.

“Where we want to focus our energy is, how can we enable our employees to achieve sustained peak performance beyond that healthy baseline?” she said.

While CGMs aren’t yet a widespread workplace benefit, employers are well aware of the healthcare costs associated with treating workers for chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes. The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker estimates each employee with diabetes, for example, adds nearly $11,000 to their employer’s annual healthcare costs.

In recent years, HR teams have tried to mitigate health costs stemming from chronic conditions by lowering cost sharing for medications to treat them, as well as offering access to virtual primary care.

While Bahri acknowledged lower health costs “may be an outcome” of Roblox’s proactive benefits, “that was not the initial trigger.” She added, “It takes time for these results to start showing in your health cost. In the long run, it will definitely change the pattern, but I think we are more invested in the holistic health.”