Return On Investment (ROI) For Employee Mental Health And Wellbeing Initiatives
WELLBEING IS GREAT, BUT WHAT’S MY RETURN ON INVESTMENT?
You know that supporting the mental health and wellbeing of your employees is the right thing to do, but what are you actually going to get out of it? What changes can you expect to see? Is it really worth all the hype?
You can bet your bottom dollar it is!
First up, let’s address the elephant in the room: we’re a wellbeing company, and our success depends on visionary leaders like you recognising why wellbeing programmes are good for your business. But we’re not just here to make a quick buck. In fact, our Founder Kev left a lucrative career in the corporate world precisely because he wanted to help people.
Fun facts (the good stuff)
“For every £1 spent by employers on mental health interventions they get £5 back in reduced absence, presenteeism and staff turnover.” (2020 analysis by Deloitte)
Improving wellbeing is all about helping your people to thrive; in business, and in life. As a leader, you’ll have plenty of areas of concern for your people right now: stress, anxiety, sleep, productivity, engagement, burnout and self-belief; the positive to all of this is that there are steps you can take, as a business and a business leader, to support your employees.
In the 2022 Deloitte Employers and Mental Health Report it found that the cost to a business of an employee experiencing low mental health to be 6.7% of their annual salary. These expenses come through reduced performed, increased absence and the likelihood of them leaving the organisation. To make matters worse, if that individual does leave the business, there then becomes a risk that the remaining team members are left under resourced and their risk of experiencing excessive stress and poor mental health rise. Hence why a business is in an important position to provide the right support, education and culture to allow people to flourish.
Crunching the numbers
Let’s crunch some numbers. So if we trust the Deloitte report and take 6.7% of an employees salary as our potential cost ( it can be much higher if there are long periods of absence and compensation claims).
Number of employees in your workplace = Eg 400
Determine how many staff make up15-20% of your workforce ( it is estimated that up to 20% of a population will be experiencing low mental health at any one time) = eg 80
x Multiplied by the average salary ( just have a good guess) = eg £35,000
Cost of poor mental health per employee £35,000 x 6.7% = £2,345
x estimated staff experiencing low mental health (80)
= £187,600 per year. ( that’s over $300,000 per our U.S and AUS readers).
Depending on the industry you’re in, that average salary could be much higher and as a result so is your potential cost related to poor employee mental health.
So what do we do with these numbers?
At Lift Your Wellbeing, for many of our clients, we say that we only need to proactively support 4 employees per year from experiencing poor mental health or helping them in their recovery across the mental health continuum for that business to experience a positive Return On Investment (ROI).
ONLY FOUR EMPLOYEES! The rest is all a positive return on investment from increased engagement, performance and retention.
Now I can confidentially tell you were are proactively supporting the mental health and wellbeing of far more than 4 employees through our our leadership and all staff training workshops, daily live-stream classes and on-demand wellbeing platform.
Whislt we are not the whole solution, for example an EAP counselling service is very important, you can see how an investment in staff training and a comprehensive employee wellbeing program is essentially a no brainer from a financial perspective.
Build it and they will come? Sadly not
We have been supporting businesses with their workplace wellbeing since 2017 so we feel we have enough runs on the board to know what makes an employee wellbeing program a thriving success that is producing a net positive return on investment and we also have seen what happens when the key engagement, leadership and communication pieces are not in place.
This is exactly what our latest eBook focuses on - How To Achieve High Engagement In Employee Wellbeing Programs ( and as such a positive ROI), click here to download it for free.
If you would like to learn more about our mental health and wellbeing training sessions as well as our digital wellbeing platform with daily live stream classes then click on the button below.
