There is now a plethora of wellbeing services, products and apps available to companies and their employees — covering everything from stop-smoking programmes, daily step ‘challenges’, financial coaching, neurodiversity support, menopause advice, bereavement helplines, second opinion medical services to online yoga and meditation sessions.
Over the past decade ‘wellbeing’ has become a buzzword across the employee benefits sector. Providers, consultants and employers are all been keen to play their part in improving the physical and mental wellbeing of employees in the hope it will lead to healthier, happier and ultimately more productive workforces.
The only problem is that to date there is scant evidence that many of these services deliver meaningful results. While Covid is a factor, recent figures from the Office of National Statistic, show the the UK lost a record number of working days to sickness in 2022, while the number of people economically inactive due to long-term sickness is also at a record high.
Nick McClelland, director of growth for Champion Health and formerly chief growth officer at Mercer, says this doesn’t mean that corporates should ditch their focus on wellness — rather that it underlines the need for a more coherent approach. The industry needs to evolve to the next stage, he says, to ensure these wellbeing strategies are positively impacting employees’ lives and delivering value for employers.
“At the moment we are at what I’d call ‘Wellbeing 2.0’ and we desperately need to push the agenda into ‘Wellbeing 3.0’. If we take a step back I think we can say that the first stage was general awareness: companies and organisations starting to understand not only did they have a responsibility to their employees, in terms of health and wellbeing, but there was a strong business case for doing this too in terms of absence management and retaining talent.
Wellbeing 3.0
“Historically, wellbeing in the workplace has been seen through a lens of health & safety and occupational health, reacting to ill-health rather than taking proactive preventative measures designed to help employees thrive. This focus has started to change in the last five to 10 years — and the process has certainly been accelerated by the pandemic.
“This is how we find ourselves in our current position with an insane number of different apps, digital services and employee benefits all purporting to boost employee wellbeing. But employers, employees and even consultants in the sector are struggling to make sense of it all.
“What are the right solutions and interventions to offer and which are likely to best yield results?”
In his time at Mercer, prior to joining Champion Health this year, McClelland worked on a project reviewing the range of wellbeing services being offered and developed across the industry. He is frank about the fact that he wasn’t overly impressed with many of them, and says there is still an element of ‘box ticking’ going on in the industry when it comes to wellbeing, from both employers and providers.
“A lot of health providers want to be in the wellbeing space so have ticked a box to provide a wellbeing service. But is it a meaningful and impactful service? I’ve not seen much evidence of that. We talk about greenwashing but there’s a degree of ‘wellwashing’ also going on as suppliers see ‘wellbeing’ as an exciting growth market and a way to grow their business.
“There’s a similar argument going on within HR, reward and benefit and occupational health teams. They feel they should be doing this, but are not always doing it in a way that is delivering results.”
The question is how the industry gets to this next level. McClelland says there are a number of key challenges which require both corporates and providers to take a new approach. First and foremost wellbeing needs to be integrated within the business strategy, he says, and be part of its corporate culture. But it isn’t just employers who can foster a more impactful wellbeing strategy — providers, and by extension the consultants advising on these services, also have a role to play.
McClelland argues there needs to be more focus on engagement, particularly through better use of technology. “We don’t focus enough on engagement. This is true across the industry, from big employee benefit consultancies to providers.
Engagement block
“When you look at the products and services people use in their personal and home lives there are far higher levels of engagement than with workplace benefits and services. This is because the companies delivering them are using technology to understand their customers, grab their attention and deliver more personalised offerings.
“It wasn’t that long ago that people would expect better technology at work that they had in their home life. This has not only flipped in the past 10 years, it has extended by a country mile. Think about the technology in our palm, how frequently we interact with it; how companies like Spotify, Amazon, Instagram and Netflix use what they know about us to personalise their services, and use gamification techniques to bring us back to their platforms. Our industry hasn’t caught up with that. It’s a big missing ingredient.”
McClelland points to unofficial statistics, but widely quoted across the industry, that suggest many mental health apps, for example, have just 5 per cent engagement levels on a regular basis. “How are we going to make an impact if that’s the engagement rate we’re seeing?
“Employers and HR departments are too often focusing on service capability, the way something intricately works, not how you reach people. But if you reach people and encourage them to engage, then there’s a much better chance of collecting meaningful data that can really power an effective wellbeing strategy.”
More robust data, that goes beyond sickness and absence information, can give employers a better picture of the current health of their workforce and target appropriate services and interventions.
McClelland gives the example of how stress levels, monitored on a regular basis, can help identify potential workplace problems. “You need to know how this is changing but also the cause. Is it workplace related, or due to relationship or financial problems?”. But it requires effective engagement strategies, to get this level of data he says.
Government role
McClelland adds he would like to see intervention from government to require companies to measure and publish data on employee health and wellbeing. “My personal view is that organisations should be embracing this within an ESG framework.” He points out that companies have to report a whole host of environmental metrics and he’d like to see similar hard data required on company’s social impact —which would include the health and wellbeing of their staff. “It’s the old adage: what get’s measured, gets done. If you put pressure on leaders to start actively measuring this it’s more likely that we will start to see wellbeing impact, rather than simply paying lip service to this idea.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, McClelland, who joined Champion Health at the start of this year, says the service it offers is looking to address some of these issues, particularly around engagement.
The platform offers a range of wellbeing services and is utilising technology to offer a more personalised service to employees. This is done via an initial 15-minute online assessment, with algorithms then tailoring the services people see to their individual needs — an approach described as a ‘Netflix for wellbeing’.
The company recently partnered with Healix Health to offer a full prevention and intervention service to employers. McClelland says the healthcare and wellbeing services are all available through the one platform — which integrates other employee benefits offered through the company, as well as external support services, for example NHS helplines and information. “There’s just one platform for all health needs, so employees don’t have numerous apps for different services.”
He adds: “We talk about software with a service, rather than software as a service. From start to finish we’re trying to think about how we engage the individual so the content and support services reflect their needs, and they they are not bombarded with irrelevant information.”
This isn’t an exclusive partnership. Champion Health is working with other providers and consultants, which McClelland sees as being an important way to get employers to think more about this engagement hurdle.
This is the other big part of the equation he says, when it comes to ‘bridging the value gap’ on wellbeing. “Wellbeing has to be an embedded part of the corporate culture, an essential part of its DNA.”
As he points out, most organisations are a long way from this at present. “There’s no single app, or service, or technology that will be the silver bullet that will get them there. For me the silver bullet is about leadership within the organisation.”
Wellbeing influencers
McClelland often draws on analogies from the tech world. He suggests that corporate CEOs, business leaders and managers need to be wellbeing ‘influencers’ if they are to make this change.
“I don’t think business leaders understand the massively powerful and positive role they could have in driving better wellbeing. They need to model good working behaviours and practices, and be open about the challenges they face, whether its mental health, poor diet and exercise or even financial issues.” McClelland himself has publicly discussed his own mental health, at work and via LinkedIn posts, but says there is often a resistance to be more open about these issues.
“In our private lives today we are influenced all the time by celebrities, by TV shows, by people on an Instragram feed. Inside an organisation you have this unique corporate culture. It is the people at the
top who carry significant influence within this culture. It goes beyond putting down some money for a new app. It’s about being authentic and being open about the challenges we face, while living and breathing new ways of working for the future.”
McClelland says the move to Champion Health in January this year felt to some extent like “completing the circle”.
He started his career almost 20 years ago at Thomson Online Benefits. “It was seen as a disruptive innovator in the market. I saw the business grow from around 25 people to 600. He then moved to the consultancy side of the fence, joining JLT where he was initially leading the sales and commercial activities of its employee benefits division. “It was a completely different world. I had to adapt quickly moving to a larger more established insurance-based business. But I enjoyed the experience and thrived.”
Technology though has been a key focus of his career. “If I’m being candid I think it is harder for larger, more established companies across the insurance and pension industry to create agile fast-moving technology.
“This was part of the appeal about the role at Champion Health. Companies like this can make decisions on the spot, there are no competing priorities or competing cap-ex budgets. You have a group of people focused on one thing and that’s a very powerful way of making an impact. As much as I enjoyed my role within those larger companies I didn’t feel I was getting closer to delivering the impact inside those business.”
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