13 Feb 2026

What really matters: Return on value vs return on investment

When assessing the success of our health benefits, should we be considering a different metric?

For years, workplace health benefits have been assessed primarily through return on investment (ROI). Employers want reassurance that spending on private medical insurance, wellbeing programmes or preventative interventions is ‘worth it’. But in practice, an ROI only lens can oversimplify what is fundamentally a complex human capital issue.

A more meaningful way of evaluating health benefits is now emerging: return on value (RoV). While ROI looks to answer: ‘How did this perform financially?’, RoV shifts the conversation to: ‘What changed, and why does it matter?’. It puts human outcomes at the centre rather than purely financial ones.

Why ROI does not always work

ROI calculations are useful when cause and effect are clear and immediate. But health and wellbeing outcomes rarely behave that neatly. A mental health intervention, for example, might reduce absence over time, but it can just as easily deliver improvements in engagement, retention, employer reputation, or workforce resilience.

These outcomes are real and strategically significant, but they do not always present in a way that satisfies a traditional financial model. As a result, two common issues arise:

Good interventions get dismissed because their financial return cannot be proven quickly or conclusively.
Benefits teams feel pressured to justify decisions using metrics that do not fully reflect the reality of workforce behaviour.

Overreliance on ROI risks undervaluing benefits that may be critical to long-term organisational health, even if the financial impact is harder to isolate.

What ‘return on value’ really means

Return on value broadens the assessment of benefits by recognising their influence across several dimensions:

Workforce resilience: Employees’ ability to cope with pressures, change and disruption.
Operational performance: Reduced friction between work and life demands, fewer disruptions, smoother delivery.
Employee experience: Trust in the employer, engagement, fairness, and perceived support.
Risk reduction: Earlier intervention, lower severity of claims and fewer escalations.

RoV does not replace ROI - they are complementary. Financial efficiency still matters, but RoV introduces measures that reflect how benefits are used and how they shape behaviour within a real workforce.

Measuring what really matters

A common hesitation with RoV is measurement. Employers often assume that if something cannot be measured with precision, it cannot be managed. Insisting on perfect measurement can slow down decision-making and mask meaningful trends.

Effective RoV frameworks focus on directional insight, emphasising a snapshot rather than a rigid projection. Useful examples include:

Patterns in short and long-term absence, segmented by risk category.
Utilisation trends across benefits, not just total spend.
Employee sentiment linked to specific interventions.
Leading indicators such as delayed access to care or repeat absence episodes.

Viewed together, these metrics create a richer and more accurate picture than financial data alone.

Aligning benefits with organisational risk

One of the strongest arguments for a value-based approach is its ability to align health benefits directly with organisational risk.

Businesses face different people-related exposures. A logistics company with an ageing workforce will face different risks to a tech firm competing for scarce digital talent. Yet benefit strategies often remain generic, designed to match market norms rather than mitigate specific organisational vulnerabilities.

A value-led approach instead asks:

Where is our workforce most at risk?
Which people-related risks create the greatest operational disruption?
Do our benefits genuinely mitigate those risks, or do they simply mirror our peers?

Framing benefits through the lens of organisational risk naturally shifts internal conversations from cost control to resilience building.

The role of data and its limits

Data is essential to making good decisions, but it must be interpreted with care. Claims MI, absence statistics and engagement or utilisation reports are valuable, but they tend to be retrospective, patchy, or difficult to compare.

Employers who integrate health data with workforce demographics, job roles and an understanding of external pressures gain far more meaningful insight. This allows them not only to see what is happening, but also to understand why.

Crucially, data should inform, not replace judgement. Health benefits operate within human systems shaped by culture, leadership, and trust - factors that no dashboard can fully capture. Data should spark better questions, not dictate conclusions.

Making better decisions, not bigger business cases

The aim of shifting from ROI to RoV is not to complicate reporting. It is to support better, more strategic decision-making.

A benefit that delivers modest financial return but strengthens workforce stability may be significantly more valuable than one offering quick cost savings. Similarly, early-intervention programmes may appear expensive in the first year but often reduce long-term absence and severity, delivering returns that extend far beyond the balance sheet.

RoV helps organisations take a longer-term view - one aligned with sustainability, not just efficiency.

A new mindset for modern workforces

Health benefits have become central to talent attraction, risk management, and sustained performance. Moving beyond ROI towards a value-based mindset recognises that employees are not simply assets to optimise, but human systems that require long-term support.

With rising costs, shifting expectations and increasingly complex workforce needs, adopting a return-on-value approach may be the most important evolution in benefits strategy. It offers the most meaningful return of all.