Investing in an employee wellbeing initiative will be as good for your business as it is for your employees. The World Economic Forum found that businesses that make a significant investment in employee wellbeing have seen up to 115% growth in earnings.
In this post, we’ll explain what employee wellbeing is, while outlining the business case for investing in employee wellbeing. We will also outline some strategies you can adopt to improve the employee wellbeing in your workplace.
What is Wellbeing?
The charity Mind defines “wellbeing” as a measure of “how we feel, how well we’re coping with daily life, and what feels possible at the moment.”
When we talk about employee wellbeing, we are talking about:
- How your employees feel on a day-to-day basis, and how well they interact with each other.
- How engaged your employees feel in their roles, and how invested they are in your business goals.
- Whether your employees feel as though they have a future in your business, or whether they’re just “going through the motions”.
- Physical wellbeing – how healthy your employees are, and how often they take unplanned absences.
Wellbeing at Work Statistics for 2024
According to HSE figures, in 2022-2024, around 35.2 million working days were lost to work-related ill health. Stress, anxiety, and depression accounted for nearly 24 million of these lost days. These lost days are estimated to cost UK businesses around £11 billion a year.
CIPD surveys demonstrate that unplanned absences recently hit the highest level in 15 years. 76% of the employees they surveyed reported having taken some form of stress-related absence. Poor mental health in the workplace also comes with a significant business cost, to the tune of around £56 billion a year.
The Business Case for Employee Wellbeing
These statistics around unplanned absences are the business case for investing in employee wellbeing. Ignore employee wellbeing and you could lose numerous days each year to unplanned absences, along with the losses in productivity that will arise from a stressed, anxious, and demotivated workforce.
Yet if you invest in employee wellbeing, you can work towards a healthier, happier, and more engaged and motivated workforce. This can contribute to increased productivity, reduced staff turnover, and an overall more positive and inspiring business culture.
Read our full guide to the links between employee health and productivity.
How To Improve Employee Wellbeing at Work
You cannot improve employee wellbeing overnight. Plus, you must not think of your employee wellbeing initiative as a one-and-done box-ticking exercise. Think of it as an ongoing investment, and a long-term commitment to helping your employees work towards good mental and physical health.
We will explore various aspects of a good employee wellbeing initiative below. But to begin with, you should aim to get a snapshot of the current state of employee wellbeing in your business.
Whether it’s through one-on-one interviews, anonymous surveys, or through bringing in a third party consultant, find a way to find out how your employees currently feel about their work and their workplace. This will give you an idea of what specifically needs to change to improve employee wellbeing in your business.
Promote a Good Work/Life Balance Through Flexible Working
Traditionally, employers insisted that all employees worked from nine to five, five days a week, and always onsite. Some businesses will always require their workers to make such commitments. But if it’s practical to do so, you can empower your employees through giving them a much greater say in how and when they work.
Let your employees work from home if they want to, and offer part-time or flexible hours for any employee who wants greater control over their schedule. Also aim to be as generous as possible when it comes to leave-based benefits, including annual leave and parental leave allowance.
If you are going to allow employees to work remotely, make sure you have measures in place to keep your remote workforce as engaged as possible.
Transform The Workspace
Do your employees have all the equipment and resources they need to work comfortable and productively? Be prepared to invest in anything your employees may need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, whether it’s new office chairs, footstools, or extra monitors.
Also consider how you could transform your workspace to make it more conducive to good employee wellbeing. Look for ways to reduce excessive noise and enhance natural light, and consider redecorating with soothing colours, live plants, and dedicated quiet spaces.
You could also consider offering your employees complementary fruit and chilled water, so that they might be less tempted to go for less healthy snacks and drinks.
Encourage Physical Activity
Not all of your employees will want to get active, and this certainly isn’t something you should enforce. But you can introduce certain measures to make it as easy as possible for any employee in your workforce to get active, should they wish to.
You could suggest that employees take short walks throughout the working day, or you could organise occasional in-office yoga or meditation sessions. You could also offer the sort of employee benefits that encourage physical activity, such as cycle-to-work schemes and subsidised gym memberships.
And speaking of employee benefits, offer a workplace health insurance plan and you can empower your employees to prioritise their health and wellbeing like never before.
Travel Insurance Schemes to Encourage Annual Leave
As we mentioned above, a good work/life balance is a cornerstone of an effective workplace wellbeing policy. And a crucial part of a good work/life balance is ensuring your employees take all of the annual leave to which they’re entitled.
A good way to achieve this is through offering leisure travel schemes as a company benefit. This means that your business travel insurance package will extend to cover your employees’ family holidays, and other personal trips.
This will send a strong message to your employees: that you value their leisure time, and that you are committed to supporting them in establishing a healthy work/life balance. This might make your employees more likely to take holidays, which can contribute to a healthier and happier workforce overall.
Learn more about the business benefits of leisure travel schemes.
Flexible Travel Insurance Schemes From Capacity Insights
At Capacity Insights, we specialise in providing bespoke travel insurance schemes for businesses. Our policies can include flexible cover for your employees’ leisure travel, and for any other travel they do outside of work hours. This means you can help them work towards a healthier and happier work/life balance as part of your wider employee wellbeing scheme.
Whether you’re looking to build a leisure travel scheme from scratch, or you wish to change or add to your current package, we can tailor a leisure travel scheme that truly meets your employees’ needs at a price you can afford.