Introduction

HR Grapevine has surveyed over 300 senior HR professionals to examine the state of their mental, physical, and financial wellbeing strategies. The findings offer surprising revelations into how UK employers are perceiving, tackling, and measuring employee wellbeing.

Alarmingly, only 35% of HR professionals say their fellow senior leaders are bought into increasing wellbeing within their workforce. This may account for the fact that more HR professionals say there has been a decline in the mental wellbeing of their workforce over the past 12 months (36%) than say there has been an increase (28%). Moreover, 54% of HR professionals say burnout is a key issue within their organisation, and a staggering 90% of HR professionals say that the cost-of-living crisis has had some type of impact on employee wellbeing in their company.

UK HR professionals say burnout (42%), a lack of financial investment (40%), and a lack of leadership support (38%) are their biggest barriers to tackling this pervasive workplace issue. Moreover, poor mental wellbeing within the HR profession continues to be a problem. Nearly half (48%) of HR professionals finding their own wellbeing has decreased over the past 12 months, indicating that wellbeing teams are too overwhelmed to tackle the issue in their workforce.

Foreword

This report by HR Grapevine of over 300 senior HR leaders is very disturbing indeed. My real worries from the results of this survey are three-fold:

1. A large number of senior leaders are not buying into the importance of the health and wellbeing of their staff and, therefore, not treating this as a strategic issue
2. Senior leaders are not creating the metrics to measure the sources and outcomes of mental wellbeing at work
3. Burnout and stress are key HR issues that are not obviously being addressed

Health and wellbeing at work need to be a strategic Board and senior leadership issue. Every Board in the public and private sectors should have a Non-Executive Director (NED) who is responsible for the wellbeing of their employees.

From an operational point of view, there should also be a senior HR leader who is responsible for creating the metrics to measure the organisation’s wellbeing such as stress-related sickness absence, labour turnover, and employee job satisfaction. This leader should work with the NED every quarter to explore the metrics and ensure that this is presented to the Board on a regular basis.

If organisations don’t take a strategic approach to employee health and wellbeing, they will see higher levels of burnout, lower productivity, higher and longer-term sickness absence and ultimately higher labour turnover. The UK is already at the bottom of the G7 on productivity per capita, and 17th in the G20!

The wellbeing of employees is an important bottom-line metric of an organisation’s success, and we need to take it seriously. Even at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the social reformer John Ruskin understood the importance of looking after workers, when he wrote in 1851: “In order that people be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it, they must not do too much of it, and they must have a sense of success in it”.

Professor Cary Cooper is the Chair of the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work, an organisation comprised of over 50 global employers including BT, Microsoft, BP, BBC, Mars, The Cabinet Office, and Rolls Royce. Co-author of Wellbeing at Work, Kogan Page, 2023.