How a health and wellbeing strategy can benefit your company

Planning, launching and evolving a health and wellbeing strategy is the best investment you will make in your team and your business.

Many businesses are still slow to deliver a health and wellbeing strategy to their people, despite showing an understanding of the need for the right initiatives to be in place. Whether it’s a case of the perceived cost, complexity or time involved, recent research by Aon reveals that less than half of UK companies have a health and wellbeing strategy in place.

We’ve developed a free health and wellbeing strategy template, to get you off to the quickest and simplest start. We believe that you can start small to make big changes. In doing so, your health and wellbeing strategy will look after the health and wellbeing of your people and your organisation.

1. Your health and wellbeing strategy will help to deliver your vision

By developing a health and wellbeing strategy, rather than just a collection of benefits, you can ensure that what you offer your employees helps to support your company’s wider business objectives.

For example, you could tweak your health and wellbeing package to focus on staying healthy and returning to work effectively, if your goal is to reduce employee absence. Measures might include private healthcare and access to counselling support. If you want to deliver and measure an uplift in employee engagement and sentiment, your initiatives would look different again and may include a strong flexible working policy, flexible holiday taking and enhanced leave packages for maternity and paternity.

Linking the strategy to your company’s objectives will allow you to set and evaluate yourself against KPIs, which will be powerful in securing and continuing to unlock a budget for health and wellbeing.

Find out how our business health and wellbeing services could support both your business and employees.

2. A strategy will control expenditure

A plan can certainly be revised and even torn up and started again – but it’s important to start with one, so that you can forecast your costs. In this case, having your strategy mapped out will allow you to ringfence a minimum viable sum that will make a difference to your team.

Aon’s research goes on to reveal that 70% of UK companies don’t have a health and wellbeing budget defined. Interestingly, many companies are investing in initiatives but not in an overall framework and direction to inform the offering. While it may be difficult to justify the cost of planning and strategy in the early days, this is an investment with long term ROI attached to it: your initiatives will be more appropriately selected, they will land better, and your team will use them more readily.

Download our free health and wellbeing strategy template now.

3. Informed initiatives will help to reduce absenteeism and presenteeism

When it comes to absenteeism, sick days are costing the UK economy £77.5 billion per year. Within this, compromised mental health and wellbeing is costing UK employers £45 billion per year. The dent on running a business might sound significant, but there is a way to improve the welfare of your people and in doing so, reduce the cost of absenteeism.

A robust health and wellbeing strategy will join up the right initiatives, helping employees avoid and manage health issues, while providing greater support to return people to work more effectively if they do become unwell. Try to consider a range of “preventative” and “remedial” initiatives:

Helping to keep your people fit, healthy and on top of their health before issues occur - An employee who is physically fit, and looks after their diet, is likely to have fewer sick days as they are generally more resistant to any "bugs going around" than a person who isn’t fit. To help employees improve their lifestyle, incorporate healthy living initiatives to encourage movement throughout the day and a balanced diet.

Help employees return to work quicker when health issues occur - When employees are off work due to illness, providing business healthcare as part of your health and wellbeing strategy could help them to receive a quicker diagnosis and swifter treatment. Our Business Healthcare provides affordable healthcare for your employees, which can help them back to work more quickly, with private diagnosis, treatment and surgery.

Your newly implemented strategy, when combined with strong and open leadership, will help to combat the effect of presenteeism, so when your team are at work, they really are at work.

Find out how our business health and wellbeing services could support both your business and employees.

4. The right offering will help to improve recruitment, retention and employee engagement

Engaged employees are happy and productive employees, which is only a good thing for your business. If you get the balance of health and wellbeing initiatives just right, you will retain your precious team and become an employer of choice for new talent.

Investing in a strategy that delivers tangible benefits and initiatives to your team is a genuine way of showing them you care. The result is a happier, more engaged workforce, pulling together in the same direction. Great people know great people, so the halo effect of a happier workforce is inbound recruitment leads from trusted team members.

5. The need to re-prioritise

Employers who were surveyed just last year by the CIPD demonstrated that there is still a lot of ground to cover, when it comes to the selection of the right initiatives. Cost and value for money factored at the top of the list, whereas being a competitive employer of choice was at the very bottom. Quite tellingly, just 33% of employers selected offerings that aligned with their business plan and strategy. Building into that plan with a health and wellbeing strategy will bring clarity when currently things may feel unclear.

If you want to launch or move an existing health and wellbeing strategy onto the next stage, our free health and wellbeing strategy template is downloadable and easy to fill in.

Our business healthcare

Benenden Healthcare for Business provides an affordable, high quality, private healthcare solution to support all your employees. With easy setup and no exclusions on pre-existing medical conditions, we want to help make healthcare a standard of employment for everyone, rather than just a perk for the few. See how we can help you develop a healthcare solution that works for your whole business.