How to get more bang for your buck in health & mental health (3/3)
This month I’ve been looking into money and the fact that, despite all the talk, most organisations aren’t yet spending a whole lot more on health, mental health and wellbeing. It’s a big and complicated topic that I will be exploring over the months to come, however this month I have been looking at the reasons that spend in this area has traditionally been low.
The way that health, mental health and wellbeing crept into the UK market explains what we see at the moment, organisations spending money in three main ways:
1. Spend on absence and attrition. The Cost of Health
2. Spend on big health providers (PHI, OH, EAP). Usually big commoditised services procured through Benefits / Reward teams and brokers
3. Small Wellbeing budgets, usually run by HR for activities and benefits
Added to this is budget allocated for various bits of training that can be related to health, mental health and wellbeing. Think Mental Health First Aid, Resilience, Energy, Corporate Athlete, Positive Psychology and any other bits and bobs that sit around the general area of Wellbeing.
What I see is that organisations are usually unwittingly spending a lot of money on health and wellbeing without realising it. It seems that spend isn’t being used strategically and that any extra spend on Wellbeing is often small and tokenistic. In short, I think that in a lot of cases, Wellbeing is still seen a nice to have, run by HR, rather than a hygiene factor in an organisation, necessary to effective functioning.
Perceptions aren’t going to change overnight, but here are some tips for what you can start to do to ensure that you are starting to have the right conversations about money in your organisation:
1. Start to calculate how much health, mental health and wellbeing is actually already costing youand your people. Pull together what data and management information you have and collate all of the bits of spend. The result is often a big shock!
2. Get the Board and the CFO onside and championing / sponsoring health and wellbeing. I have found that this is much easier to do when you have done step 1. This moves the conversation away from the realms of HR and small wellbeing budgets into a board level discussion about real organisational spend and an organisational approach to Wellbeing.
3. Put together a good and comprehensive board-level strategy and framework around health, mental health and wellbeing. This is where someone like me could come in. You need to ensure that the strategy is end to end, based on data and is written by someone who knows what they are doing. If you don’t have that expertise internally, buy it in. Your strategy will help you understand exactly what spend does and does not need to be on and to give you a framework for the future.
a. Look at what current spend is already on
b. Is there any duplication in spend?
c. How can you your existing providers more effectively?
i. Promote more to your people
ii. Get them to deliver more services
iii. Use their data to help you design your strategy more effectively
d. What are the gaps?
e. How much more do you need to spend over time to fulfill your strategy aims?
4. Put together some ‘Principles of Health Spend’.For example, do you want to get to the point, in time, where your policy is to offer everyone comprehensive private health insurance covering a certain number of things? Or a proper organisational G.P. service? Working together, at Board level, to make some decisions about what exactly you want, in future, to offer your people helps to direct spend. It enables a positive ‘no’ to the requests for spend on what I call ‘fluff’ as you can point people to these and what you value spending money on. Over time as you release savings from else where you can move in this direction.
5. Establish some guidance about what the Wellbeing pot is,what it is to be used for and how much is in it, from the context of having all the above. There will always be departments and teams that want to do different things, celebrate awareness days, have specific speaker events, have workshops. Your Wellbeing budget can be used to facilitate this, but with some structure and thought around it.
This is a particularly tricky area of the job, so do get in touch with me if you need support.
Next month, I’ll be looking in more detail at health providers. Many organisations are already spending thousands, if not millions on different types of these. I’ll be looking at what this spend is, how to make the most of the providers you have and how to get to a position where these are a key part of your Wellbeing strategy with you procuring proactively, not just buying what the broker and the provider tell you too. Anyone working on health, mental health or wellbeing in an organisation should check it out.
Keep going with comments and debate. The more we explore these topics together the better and the more we can change things for the better.
