05 Dec 2025

Building a wellbeing strategy that flexes with life stages and work patterns

A wellbeing strategy built around life stages flexes with life’s realities meeting people where they are in life with what they need at that time.

Walk through any workplace and you’ll find a spectrum of human experiences. New parents running on little sleep. Mid-career employees trying to balance ambition with burnout. Colleagues caring for loved ones while navigating their own health challenges.

But the fact is, some challenges are more visible, more socially accepted and supported than others.

However, if organisations want to genuinely care for their people, they need to design support that evolves with them. That means building a wellbeing strategy shaped by life stages, modern work patterns, and the very real pressures your employees face every day.

The business case

Britain’s escalating sickness bill underscores why health and wellbeing can no longer sit at the fringes of workforce strategy, but must be treated as core economic infrastructure.

A recent report led by former John Lewis boss Sir Charlie Mayfield warned that the UK was “sliding into an economic inactivity crisis”, with 800,000 more people now out of work due to health conditions than in 2019 and employer sickness costs estimated at £85bn a year.

Illness-related inactivity is thought to cost the wider UK economy around £212bn annually – close to 70% of income tax receipts – through lost output, higher welfare spending and increased pressure on the NHS, making workforce health a macroeconomic as well as a moral imperative.

With over one in five working-age adults now out of the workforce and projections suggesting a further 600,000 people could leave work for health reasons by 2030 without intervention, the case for employer-led, preventative wellbeing strategies that keep people healthy and in work across different life stages has never been stronger.

The care crisis

Stephanie Leung, founder of KareHero, says the UK has reached a moment of reckoning. “In 2023, the UK workforce reached a tipping point,” she said. “It was the first time in history that the UK workforce would look after more adult dependents than child dependents.”

With birth rates falling, the largest segment of workers over the next 15 years will be over 40 and, as Leung said, “predominantly coming into a caring role in the lifetime of their career.”

Ignoring this shift, she warns, means ignoring it “at our peril.” By the age of 50, she added, “you have a 50% chance of either being a carer or being cared for,” a reality that spans far beyond elderly parents to spouses, siblings, and young adults living with long-term illness.

Almost 3 million people are already out of work due to long-term sickness, and as Leung said, “someone is having to look after these people … and if they are not supported, the employer risks losing some of the best talent that this country has to offer.”

Her own experience underscores how unpredictable caring can be. “No one ever expects to become a carer,” she says. “I was a carer from the age of 14… carers can come in all ages, all sizes, and all genders and all cultural backgrounds,” said Leung.

But adult caregiving is just one of the life-stage pressures employees juggle. Others are raising children, moving through menopause, supporting partners’ careers, recovering from illness, or planning for retirement. The common thread? Life rarely aligns neatly with work.

How TSB built a comprehensive health and wellbeing programme

These shifting pressures are exactly what forward-thinking employers like TSB have begun addressing.

TSB’s comprehensive wellbeing programme has been deliberately built around the real needs of its workforce, shaped by what director of reward and performance Will Rayden calls the bank’s responsibility “to hire the best people, to retain the best people and to motivate them to do a great job for us.”

They started with understanding the specific needs of their workforce – with surveys – and the factors influencing sickness and retention. “In 2020, we introduced two weeks of paid carers leave on top of their annual holiday entitlement,” said Rayden, alongside medical and wellness benefits and hybrid working. Still, many carers were struggling.

“All of our 5,000 employees could well be carers at some point in time,” yet only around 8% identify as such – an underestimate, according to Rayden, given TSB’s “older population” and the fact that “about 65% of our population are females,” demographics that correlate with higher caring responsibilities.

His position is clear: “Employee health is really important to TSB. A healthier workforce, both physically and mentally will enable the business to perform at its best.” The result is a programme grounded in practical help, early intervention, and a commitment to reducing attrition through genuinely inclusive support.

Flexibility and remote working

A truly flexible wellbeing strategy must evolve with the shifting realities of employees’ lives, and for TSB that has meant embedding hybrid working and adaptable work patterns at the core of its approach.

A wellbeing framework should include medical benefits and other wellness related benefits, as well as a hybrid approach to flexible working, recognising that real-world pressures – especially caring responsibilities – don’t fit neatly around a traditional nine-to-five.

KareHero sees firsthand how carers can be forced to use holiday allowance when they wouldn’t otherwise have needed to, simply because their work structures lack the flexibility to accommodate unexpected demands.

“Flexibility has become a strategic imperative, not a perk. It’s central to helping people stay healthy, supported, and able to continue a rewarding career, even as their life stages and responsibilities shift,” said Leung.

But flexibility alone isn’t enough.

KareHero’s findings show that flexibility alone often acts as a "crutch that doesn’t actually solve the root cause" of out-of-work challenges like caregiving.

In the case of adult caregiving, only a fraction of companies, about 14.1%, offer dedicated support and even fewer (5.7%) have formal care support programmes. Such support is critical, given that caregiving responsibilities impact more than half of surveyed organisations negatively in terms of retention and productivity.

The lesson: flexibility must be paired with practical, tailored support if it’s going to deliver real wellbeing impact.

A life-stage approach, is an inclusive approach

A life-stage approach is, at its core, an inclusive one, because it recognises that wellbeing needs to shift dramatically as people move through different chapters of their lives.

It begins with fostering open conversations from leadership downward and creating a culture where employees feel able to share what they’re navigating, whether that’s early parenthood, fertility journeys, menopause, managing chronic health conditions, or caring for aging relatives.

Pairing that openness with regular employee insight, through surveys, listening sessions, and demographic data, helps organisations understand who needs what, and when. This is particularly important for women and older employees, who disproportionately carry both childcare and adult caregiving responsibilities.

As Leung said, “By the time you’re 50, you have a 50% chance of being a carer, but if you’re a woman, the average age of becoming a carer is 47, compared with 53 for a man.”

But the principle extends far beyond caring alone: employees in their twenties may need flexibility for study or financial wellbeing support; those in their thirties and forties may be balancing children and careers; those approaching retirement may be managing health concerns or planning major transitions.