Engaging businesses in health and wellbeing benefits
Engaging businesses in health and wellbeing benefits
When it comes to ‘unseen’ problems, such as mental health, it can be hard for businesses to quantify the effects of investment.
We all know that mental health is increasingly moving up the national agenda with more and more people prepared to admit that they are struggling and ask for help.
But perhaps harder for businesses is to find ways of gauging the effectiveness of their investment in mental health and wellbeing benefits for staff.
However, it’s clear that with 12.8million working days lost in the UK in one year due to stress, depression and anxiety, this is a critical area for employers to focus on.
That’s where the EAP Return on Investment (ROI) calculator launched last year by UK EAPA comes in to play: the calculator is designed to help businesses work out the effectiveness of money spent in this area. And in fact, the benefit of the EAP ROI calculator has been picked up on in a recent article for Personnel Today.
“Boosting productivity through health and wellbeing benefits”, powerfully argues how giving employees access to daily benefits offering health and wellbeing support will achieve very positive results on a firm’s productivity.
The article points to the fact that of all the EU countries, the UK has seen the biggest slump in productivity, where once it had the highest output per hour within the union.
Research at Canada Life also showed that, while employees understood wellbeing was important, only one in five thought their employer believed the same.
The article goes on to stress the importance for employers in investing in their staff.
“An ROI calculator was launched last year by the EAP Association for organisations to see for themselves why investing in this service may be judicious,” the article says.
UK EAPA chair Eugene Farrell says: “It’s great to see that the usefulness of our ROI calculator have been picked up on in the HR sector press. When we launched this service, it was with the aim of helping employers see the benefits of their investment in EAP so we are pleased to see that is being recognised.”