How employers can get ahead in the race for employee health and wellbeing needs

Preventative healthcare is gathering increasing momentum as a way of supporting employees and saving money.

Hybrid work, global mobility, demographic changes and rising chronic conditions are reshaping what employees need from their employers.

Rising healthcare costs, tighter labour markets and growing mental health pressures mean that traditional, treatment-focused benefits are no longer enough. Leading organisations are shifting from a ‘paying for care when people are ill’ mindset to an ‘investing in health so people stay well’ strategy.

Preventative care is moving to centre stage for several reasons:

Treating advanced illness is significantly more expensive than preventing it. Early detection and lifestyle support can manage the impact of long term medical and disability costs.
Healthy, supported employees are more engaged, less likely to be absent and more likely to stay.
For multinational employers, a prevention-focused framework can provide a consistent wellbeing “backbone” across markets, even where local healthcare systems differ.

Embedding prevention is not about adding a single new programme. Firstly, we must address potential gaps in current employee benefits alongside the gaps in communication that act as an invisible roadblock to employees accessing services and tools in the first place.

So, what do the individual building blocks look like if we’re creating employee benefits that meet the global workforces’ evolving needs?

1. Start with a holistic wellbeing framework

A preventative strategy works best when it recognises the full spectrum of wellbeing:

Physical health: fitness, sleep, nutrition, chronic disease risk
Mental and emotional health: stress, anxiety, burnout, resilience
Financial wellbeing: security, planning, protection
Social and workplace wellbeing: belonging, purpose, healthy workloads

This holistic lens helps HR and benefits teams map existing benefits against a simple wellbeing framework and identify where an organisation is heavily weighted to ‘cures’ and where they can strengthen ‘prevention’.

2. Make preventative healthcare the default

Preventative healthcare is the foundation of any prevention-focused strategy. This might look like annual health screening, 24/7 GP support, vaccinations, and digital lifestyle/chronic condition programmes, such as fitness management or musculoskeletal training.

Zurich International’s insights from 2025 show musculoskeletal issues as the third highest cause for disability claims, below mental health and cancer.

We also need to consider what the access looks like: are they available via an app, regular Teams appointments, or phone calls? How will your people find out about them and how do we ensure they don’t forget that these tools are available to them?

3. Put mental health and early intervention at the heart

Mental health is one of the biggest drivers of absence and reduced productivity. A preventative approach goes beyond employee assistance programmes (EAPs) to focus on early warning, easy access and stigma reduction within an eco-system that looks at both the causes of poor mental health and the symptoms.

Ensuring mental health support is available 24/7, including to dependants and wider family, is the first step to implementing an early intervention strategy. Training managers to recognise early signs of distress and to signpost support helps to normalise conversations about mental health. With digital tools that offer self-guided support becoming increasingly prevalent, it may be tempting to rely on them alone but offering various pathways to both online and in-person support ensures that you are meeting the needs of a multigenerational workforce.

4. Design benefits for the whole workforce, including mobile employees

Workforces are increasingly global and mobile. International assignees and cross-border teams often fall between the cracks of local benefit systems. A prevention-focused strategy needs to cover them too.

Providing consistent life and disability cover for internationally mobile employees as they move between countries can fill potential gaps left by local systems. Mapping your internationally mobile population will help pinpoint weaknesses that could be resolved through international group solutions that maintain continuity of cover for the whole workforce with access to preventative services across borders, languages, and time zones.

5. Support everyday wellbeing through work design and flexibility

Benefits alone cannot deliver prevention. The way work is organised – workloads, flexibility, autonomy – is equally important. Embracing flexible working structures helps employees to balance responsibilities, reducing stress levels and positively impacting their overall wellbeing. This kind of policy underpins the effectiveness of any wellbeing programme.

Meeting the evolving needs of a diverse workforce means shifting from simply treating illness to actively preventing it. By building a holistic wellbeing framework that prioritises early intervention and ensure preventative healthcare is a part of standard benefits, employers can create benefits that genuinely protect the long-term health of employees and support a more engaged, resilient workforce.