The Value of Wellness
Can your business afford not to support Employee Wellness?
We've all heard the rhetoric about how important it is to support our staff with their mental and physical health, about how your employees will be more engaged with the business and 'go the extra mile' for you, if you show you care about them.
For a long time now, forward thinking businesses with plenty of capital have been signing up to discount gym membership deals and third-party employee assistance programmes. They know the true cost of not supporting their people isn’t just about the impact on their employee satisfaction and engagement survey scores.You don't have to go as far as companies like Asana offering nap rooms or Google offering free massage therapy to their staff, but you really can't ignore the facts and if you don't think hard about what you can afford to put into your budget for employee wellness, there will be a cost to your business in other ways.
The cold, hard financial statistics we usually see when reviewing the cost of poor employee wellness are based on the impact of Absence, Presenteeism and Attrition to a business.
Absence
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) estimates that absence costs an organisation about £600 for each employee each year, however this is based on only the direct cost of covering the absence itself. The indirect costs of absence are far more difficult to put a price on - things like additional management time required to resolve issues caused by the absence, delays in projects where it's not possible to cover the specific skills or knowledge missing, or, potentially lost business or upset customers not getting as good a service from the temporary cover arranged.
Presenteeism
More difficult to prove on a business score card, but if your staff are attending work when they don't feel well or have distractions caused by their personal lives, they won't be productive and therefore are as good as absent. Long gone is the thinking that the business workday starts at 9am, ends at 5pm, and you leave your problems at the door before you turn your computer on. Every one of us knows how difficult it is to concentrate or "be our best" when we are just putting on a brave face and battling through. In 2006 the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health estimated that presenteeism due to psychological issues accounted for 1.5 times as much working time lost as absenteeism.
Attrition (Staff Turnover)How many employees have left your organisation because of underlying health and wellbeing issues? Most academic researchers estimate around 50% of annual recruitment costs can be attributed to replacing leavers who left or were exited because of known or unknown illness or mental health concerns. The Mental Health Charity, Mind.org, found in a national survey that 14% of employees said they had resigned and 42% had considered resigning due to workplace stress. The same study also found that one in three people found their work life affected their mental health more than their financial problems or worries about their physical health. Poor mental health leads to poor performance.
But, perhaps even more importantly, what of the non-tangible costs to your organisation?Supporting Employee Wellness leads to an engaged and happy workforce which, in turn, creates a great working atmosphere where everyone can be who they are, have fun, and do their best work. Workplaces with high employee engagement seriously outperform those with lower scores. Engaging workplaces see higher profitability, productivity, and customer ratings, not to mention lower staff turnover and absence figures. There are many statistics, academic and real world case studies which prove this, but instinctively, deep down, you know this already, don't you? Really, it's a no brainer and, much in the same way you've put money aside in your budgets to pay for IT security or business premises insurance, shouldn't you think about protecting the health and wellbeing of your company's greatest assets in the same way?