Wellbeing in the workplace

Nuffield Health & Ashridge Business School put employee wellbeing firmly on the agenda

Last year, recognising the changing nature of wellbeing policy and the need for thought leadership in a growing market, Nuffield Health, in partnership with Ashridge Business School, embarked on a landmark research project to discover how businesses are shaping their employee wellbeing programmes.

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Landmark research into workplace wellbeing

Nuffield Health is the largest provider of health assessments in the UK, and works with more than 1,600 employers. Our initial research reveals business wants to deliver more sophisticated and individually tailored employee wellbeing programmes.

More and more businesses are recognising the financial and reputational value of a comprehensive employee wellbeing programme. Many see this as a key part of the strategy to becoming ‘an employer of choice’ - a place where talented people want to work.

What does this research show?

From our initial research we have discovered companies need further guidance in designing and implementing their own wellbeing strategies, to make sure they choose the most effective strategy.

The current factors influencing these businesses include a change in illness patterns, for example, 16million working days are now lost to business due to obesity. Overall, sickness absence and worklessness with ill health costs the UK economy £100bn a year.

Our initial research indicates that companies are increasingly looking to wellbeing programmes to tackle these issues, moving away from the traditional occupational health and safety to overall employee wellbeing. In addition, employees are also expressing a growing desire to have individualised wellbeing offerings which put personal responsibility at the heart of them.

• Read ‘Corporate investment in employee wellbeing; the emerging strategic imperative’ - written by Ellen Prune for Nuffield Health and Ashridge Business School’.