Money, money, money! In the wellbeing world. (2/3)

I’m kicking off 2020 with a most awkward topic: Money… We hate talking about it, don’t we? I’m also going to start 2020 with a controversial statement: Despite all the hype around mental health and wellbeing in the past few years, I don’t think that organisations are increasing their spend as much as they should. 

Why does this matter? Well, without spending more on health, mental health and wellbeing, things aren’t really going to change for people on the ground. Organisations can huff and puff and talk until they are blue in the face about changing their culture around health and mental health, but the reality is that unless they are going to spend more money, they aren’t putting their money where their mouth is. They aren’t really committed to change. 

Money is a big and complicated topic, so I’ll be unpicking it over a few months. I’ll be looking at what organisations currently spend (spoiler alert; most have no idea how much health and mental health currently cost them), the many, varied reasons to why health and wellbeing spend has historically been low and lastly why many organisations simply feel lost at sea due to the sheer amount of providers and benefits out there. 

So what DO organisations spend on? 

Here’s the thing - organisations have always unknowingly spent a lot of money on health through absence and attrition. Conscious spend on health and mental health is usually concentrated in two main pots:

1)  The ‘Wellbeing’ pot. This is a small budget that covers wellbeing activities and ‘benefits’. Think fruit bowls, yoga sessions, mindfulness, external speaker events, and such like. Sometimes training such as Mental Health First Aid comes from here too. This pot is usually small, owned by HR, and has to cover anything and everything that is done around Wellbeing. In other words, every request or idea around Wellbeing, from massages, to Pilates classes, to apps and FitBits, competes for spend from this pot. 

2)  Healthcare providers pot. Larger organisations (and increasingly smaller ones too) tend to spend thousands on things such as Private Health Insurance, Occupational Health, Health Screens and Employee Assistance Programmes. The thing is that they don’t think of this spend as Wellbeing spend and often these providers aren’t linked in any way to the health and wellbeing strategy. They are regarded as employee benefits and are procured by Benefits and Rewards teams through the big brokers. I’ll be covering this whole area next month when I look in depth at health providers. 

As Wellbeing has become more of a hot topic Wellbeing budgets have increased in recent years but are still tiny. (Maybe a few thousand pounds for large organisations and much less for smaller ones.) Organisations want to be seen to ‘do something’ so have allocated a bit of budget into that first pot and have left it to HR to get on with something. That ‘something’ being an internally written and delivered strategy and a few pockets of Wellbeing activity funded by the budget. Not a strategic look at health, mental health and wellbeing championed and sponsored by the board, with a commitment to upping spend and allocating serious budget for proper culture change.  

The reality is that, despite a lot of talking about Wellbeing, organisations are barely spending more on it or their existing health providers than they were a decade ago. 

Next blog I’ll be looking at how you can look at spend on health and wellbeing and how to start to make the changes to this that will have an impact to your people on the ground. In the meantime, as always, I’d love your comments and thoughts below.