REBA Inside Track: Employers must brace for rapid health and wellbeing evolution as responsibility rises
There are three stark incoming trends that will significantly shift the dial on workplace wellbeing strategies. First, a major upsurge in data being used to analyse the impact of employee health and wellbeing on HR and business risks and objectives. Second, an expectation among employers that responsibility for workforce health will fall to them as the state, via the NHS, struggles to meet the ever-growing needs of the UK population. Third, that employers will expect employees themselves to take on more responsibility for their own health.
Furthermore, there are three factors that are already causing a rapid evolution in employee wellbeing – the rising cost of employer-funded health benefits; adjustments to meet the very different needs of generations as the workforce ages; and how meeting the diverse requirements of the ever-more inclusive workforce is pushing up spend on a wider range of health and wellbeing benefits.
All of these key findings from the ninth edition of REBA’s Employee Wellbeing Research 2024, published in partnership with AXA Health, interplay with and drive each other.
Strategy shift
Nearly nine in 10 respondents acknowledge that they will have to shift strategies to take on more responsibility for employee health, as opposed to relying purely on the NHS.
However, they do not expect to take on full responsibility for all aspects of health for the working population. Rather, as this research indicates, they will become increasingly savvy at looking at wellbeing data in order to identify what health interventions must be targeted to meet performance and productivity goals, or what risks would arise from not intervening.
Alongside this, they will push more responsibility onto employee shoulders from line managers to employee resource groups. Taking responsibility for individual health, coincidentally, is the direction of travel for the wider medical community (both private and public), even if most people aren’t fully aware of that yet.
All change
In a society where the population is ageing, the way we used to ‘do health’ has to change. The burden is simply too great for the NHS to support all needs in the way it used to (and was never intended to, when it was set up in 1948).
Swirling change, from government policies through to technological advances, will be working to solve this dichotomy. And the jury is still out on whether medical advances will further push up health costs, or help reduce it through the use of the likes of artificial intelligence.
But what cannot be denied is the need for a wider range and personalisation of health and wellbeing benefits via the workplace. The meteoric rise of benefits for specific groups, from fertility services to support for carers, and the expected increase in use of current core benefits by older workers have been, and will continue to be, game changers for health, wellbeing and benefits strategies.
