What the UK's duty of care guidelines mean for wellbeing benefits
An employee with excellent access to stress support can still walk into an unmanageable workload the next morning. The UK's new Duty of Care Guidelines, launched in Parliament this September by the Policy Liaison Group on Workplace Wellbeing (PLG) after being delivered to 10 Downing Street, are built around that gap.
The PLG brings together people working across policy, employment and workplace health, and its report is aimed at those shaping UK policy rather than HR teams directly. Even so, it has real implications for how benefits are designed and reviewed.
Support alone isn't the fix
Rather than focusing only on the support available once someone is struggling, the guidelines look earlier: how work is designed, whether workloads are realistic, how managers behave day to day, and whether employees have any say in decisions that affect them.
Healthcare, mental health services and financial wellbeing tools all have a place here, particularly when someone needs help now. But the guidelines draw a clear line: support helps people cope with difficulties; it doesn't remove the conditions that caused them. Employers need to think about both, not treat one as a substitute for the other.
Listening beats measuring take-up
This changes what a decent review of a wellbeing offer looks like. Take-up figures tell you whether people are using a service, not what's happening in their working week, so understanding that means listening to employees directly, including the ones who never use the benefits on offer.
If a team is reporting persistent stress, the useful question isn't whether they know how to access support, it's whether workload, staffing or management practice need to change. If people say a benefit is hard to fit around their shifts, fixing that service probably matters more than adding a new one. The real test is whether feedback ever turns into a decision employees can see.
Employee voice sits alongside healthy job design, risk prevention, inclusion, fairness and appropriate support as one of the guidelines' core pillars, and organisations are being asked to measure how people experience their work, rather than waiting for the numbers to show up in absence or turnover data later.
Where financial wellbeing comes in
Practical tools and clear information can ease money worries in the moment, but someone's longer-term financial experience is shaped just as much by their pay, how predictable their hours are, and how much control they have over their working life. Financial inclusion sits alongside physical and mental health throughout the PLG's work, not as an afterthought.
I was one of ten named authors behind the guidelines, work that spans financial wellbeing, mental health, HR strategy and workplace analytics. Alongside Clemens Moehring for Hastee, the report brings together Gethin Nadin, Chair of the PLG and also part of the Zellis group through Benifex, plus Shamira Graham (OneBright), Damon Lacey and Sonya Woodside (BAT), Ray Law (Moneyappi), David Liddle (The TCM Group), Emily Pearson (Wellbeing Lead Academy), Maria Paviour (Optimism Consulting) and Kirsten Samuel (Kamwell).
That range reflects a wider point the guidelines make: financial wellbeing is best understood as part of someone's whole experience of work, not as a benefit sitting on its own next to the others.
The guidelines are a framework for policymakers, not a new legal requirement on employers. But for reward and benefits teams, they point towards the same conclusion Hastee has been building its own approach around: useful, accessible support only gets you so far without a genuine read on how people are actually experiencing their working life, and the will to act on what that reveals.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Hastee – A Zellis Company
Financial wellbeing solutions helping employees reduce financial stress.
