Three Reasons Employee Wellness Programs Are a Cost-Savings Investment

Work is central to our wellbeing, and our wellbeing is central to our work. Nobody will thrive in life if they are miserable at work, and the opposite is also true — our work suffers when we suffer.

This inherent interdependence is why the push for work-life balance has left so many people burnt out. Viewing work as separate from life asks us to perform the impossible task of severing our wellbeing from how we spend a significant portion of our waking hours. It also asks far too little from our jobs. If workers are giving employers a third of their lives, employers should be expected to contribute to those lives. The default expectation of a job should not be that it will wear people down, creating a strain that must be ‘balanced out.’ 

Employment should help people thrive. As Wellhub’ Chief People Officer, I strive to make that a reality everyday. We aim to facilitate not work-life balance but work-life wellness, an attainable state of wellbeing where life's experiences in and outside of work interact to the benefit of happiness, health, and performance.

One of our key initiatives at Wellhub is to promote a strong trust-based culture that fosters flexibility, empowerment and accountability. This culture ensures we value both our employees’ contribution to the business as well as their contribution to their own wellbeing. Our teams may make different agreements of how and when they work to allow teammates to exercise in the middle of the afternoon. Or even incorporate team meditations at the start of every meeting. By doing so, we have seen great results in ensuring we prioritize wellbeing at work. 

Organizations caring for their workers is not some utopian idea — it’s actually just good business. Ninety percent of companies that measure the return on investment of wellbeing programs see a positive ROI, according to Wellhub’s 2023 Return on Wellbeing Report, released today.

We surveyed more than 2,000 HR leaders in nine countries to identify how employee wellbeing impacts a company’s bottom line. Their response is clear: Supporting workforce wellness delivers returns in more ways than one. It increases productivity while simultaneously delivering talent management and healthcare savings. This triple-benefit shows exactly how much it pays to take a people-first approach to business.

The top findings in Wellhub’ 2023 Return on Wellbeing Report include:

• 90% of companies that measure their wellness program’s ROI see a positive return. 
• 100% of HR leaders say wellness programs are important to employee satisfaction.
• 85% of HR leaders say their wellness program decreased the cost of talent recruitment, retention and/or engagement. 
• 85% of respondents report decreased utilization of sick days thanks to their wellness program.
• 78% of respondents say their wellness program reduced their company’s health care costs.

I see this connection between personal and professional wellbeing every day, but you don’t have to work in human resources to see how important people are at any organization. It doesn’t matter if you work in education or technology, fashion or farming. At the end of the day, every industry is run by and for people, so the wellbeing of the people running your organization will determine how well your organization runs. Helping your people thrive will always advance your business.

One of the major barriers companies face acting on this reality is a lack of metrics. We live in a data-driven world. If you have hard numbers on Q3 profitability but aren’t tracking how employee satisfaction is driving expensive turnover, wellbeing is unlikely to be factored into how a business operates. 

That’s the reality facing one in five of the HR leaders who don't know how to measure the return of a wellbeing program. If that’s you, the Return on Wellbeing Report is here to lend a hand. It provides a step-by-step guide to calculating an employee wellness program’s positive return, and tips on how to use that figure to convince your C-suite to invest in employee wellness. Our simple Company Wellbeing ROI equation will allow you to put a number to what we already know: every workplace benefits from wellness.