Identify The Business Challenge
74% of people reported that stress was the biggest problem they faced at work.
Work related stress and mental ill health costs British businesses £1,700 per person per year. Contrary to popular belief, the bulk of this cost is actually down to presenteeism, not absenteeism. These are your colleagues who are turning up to work but underperforming due to not being able to cope with excessive workload, long working hours, imperfect work relationships and feeling a lack of control. Ultimately, these team members are not able to give their best and it’s costing your business dearly.
What are the biggest challenges in your team that might be contributing to presenteeism, absenteeism or high staff turnover? Highlighting these in your business case is going to help communicate the cost and impact of NOT TAKING ACTION. Here are some things to consider:
- Your organisation’s culture may be having the largest impact on wellbeing in the workplace. How is your culture holding up with the battering it’s taken since the pandemic? How has it changed as a result? What challenges does this pose to the wellbeing and mental health of your team now?
- Resourcing is one of the biggest things that contributes towards the stress of your team. With organisational changes, furlough, and redundancies, do your team feel like they have enough resource to achieve their targets? Are there members of your team at risk of burnout, jumping ship or going off ill due to this?
- Lack of communication is often cited as one of the reasons why colleagues feel stressed. The increase in remote and hybrid working has posed significant challenges to the way we communicate with our team. Is this a challenge for your organisation? Have you considered how you need to alter your communication channels and your approaches to this to ensure the team feel like they are being kept up to date?
Clearly identify these challenges in your business case so that you can see what you’re up against and the challenges you need to tackle. Are you unsure on what these challenges might be? Book a call with one of our Corporate Wellbeing Specialists who will help you to identify these challenges.
Identify The Business Opportunity
An organisation is only as good as it’s people.
- Wellbeing has a direct impact on performance. If your team feel their voices are heard and that you are taking a proactive approach to their mental health and wellbeing, they are nearly five times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work. What impact would that have on your business?
- Do you know how your team are? What metrics do you have in place to measure this and how often do you ask? If you don’t know this data, you need to find out! This will then give you the opportunity to design wellbeing and mental health programmes that address the specific issues that are occurring.
- If there’s one thing we can be sure of for the future, it’s unpredictability! This just adds to pre-existing workplace pressures. But this is the perfect opportunity to show your team that they can be sure of your support for their wellbeing and positive mental health. Your team will feel safer, more valued, and a stronger sense of belonging if they see that you are invested in their wellbeing. If done correctly, this will be reflected in the organisation’s performance.
Clearly list out the opportunities you have to address the challenges, increase performance and understand your team better and the wider positive impacts this would have on the business. If you’re struggling to get this down into words, get in touch to discuss with one of our wellbeing experts who will help you to work out what these might be.
Identify The Return On Investment
Reactive initiatives such as Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP’s) achieve an ROI of less than 2:1 compared to over 5:1 for proactive initiatives such as Mental Health First Aid training.
It’s time to stop seeing wellbeing and mental health initiatives as a ‘nice to have’ that you can no longer afford. Initiatives such as EAP’s are expected by employees as standard now and often seen as a ‘tick box’ by leadership. But do you really want your colleagues to get to a crisis point where they need to use an EAP? What have they had to go through to get to this point and what impact has that already had on your business? You can gain much a much higher ROI from more proactive initiatives that focus on culture change and raising awareness and decrease the number of employees that need to use that EAP. In fact, you’re likely to achieve an ROI of somewhere between 5:1 and 11:1. Surely that’s a no-brainer? You’ll see this return purely through a reduction in absenteeism and staff turnover and an increase in productivity. But there are other benefits too that are a little harder to quantify such as:
- A decrease in mistakes being made and the subsequent cost of these.
- An increase in innovation and creativity and the business benefits this brings.
- An increased ability to take advantage of market opportunities due to your increased resources.
- A bump to your reputation as a great employer and business to work with, attracting the best talent.
If you want to work through the numbers for your business case, we’re always on hand to help out with this. Just request a zoom call and we’ll talk you through it.
Identify The Best Approach
There is no one best approach. The best approach is the one that will get the best results for your business. You’ll only know what this might be by understanding your insights first.
We very often throw money at a problem in the hope that it works. Even if it doesn’t, at least it looks like we’ve tried right? We don’t think this is a sustainable approach or one that ensures the best results. Our tried and tested approach is based on three pillars. Creating your Business Case around these pillars will ensure that you’re understanding the real issues, investing in the right initiatives to address those issues, and ensuring that you build in accountability to continually adapt your approach to the changing environment. These pillars are:
- Insights – It’s important to ensure you’re spending your resources fixing the actual concerns in your team. You can only do this if you know what they are, which is why it’s important to ask! Gather as much data as you can from your HR systems, but also from your people. Surveys and interviews can be an incredibly valuable source for these insights. What’s your plan for gathering these insights?
- Support – Once you have your insights, you’re in a good place to plan your budget wisely to specifically address the concerns that have been highlighted. Don’t assume that one solution is going to appeal to your whole team. You might need different solutions and support mechanisms for different teams, different locations, different levels of your hierarchy or maybe even for specific individuals. What initiatives are you going to invest in?
- Accountability – Once you’ve got your new wellbeing and mental health programmes underway, you must not take your foot off the peddle. It’s imperative that you monitor the impact of what you’re doing, communicate the results and demonstrate to your stakeholders that you are making adjustments to the plan based on the feedback and that this is a constantly evolving strategy and approach. How are you going to keep yourselves accountable to this as an ongoing, ever evolving concern?
Internal accountability can be tough to achieve which is why a lot of our clients ask us to be their wellbeing partners. To find out more about how this could work for you, arrange a coffee over a zoom call and we’ll talk you through it or help you identify another way you can include accountability into your business case.
Identify the Benefits
If you’ve done the other four sections well, the biggest benefits have already been clearly demonstrated. This section is an opportunity for you to put the icing on the cake!
Finish off your business case by appealing to the human side of your decision makers and highlighting the specific positive benefits that your plan is going to have on the people in your organisation. Try to hit all these areas:
- Mental – Talk about the improvement in mental health awareness that your team will enjoy and the benefit that will have to their self-awareness, resilience, and their ability to help and support others. If you have data on how much access to talking therapies are costing the business, you might be able to highlight a direct cost benefit to the potential reduction to this as a result of your proposals.
- Physical – Highlight the ways in which your plan will positively impact your team’s physical health. It’s a good idea to mention here that physical and mental health are linked and support one another. If you’ve got data relating to the cost of physical health insurance claims, you might be able to highlight a direct cost benefit to the potential reduction in cost of insurance premiums as a result of your proposals.
- Financial – Show how your proposals will support the financial wellbeing of your team. It’s tricky for individuals to focus on the other areas of wellbeing when they are worried about their financial situation. If you don’t already, it’s a good idea to ask about financial wellbeing in your employee surveys. You can then track the impact of your financial wellbeing initiatives over time.
- Social – Some of your proposal should be focussed on how you are helping your team to maintain healthy relationships, both inside and outside of work. This includes a healthy relationship with yourself by practicing self-care. Again, any data you can collect on this will be valuable to help you track the impact of your strategy.
If you’re struggling to get the benefits of your proposed plan down into words, we’re on hand to help. Just get in touch to discuss with one of our wellbeing experts.
As you’re going through these five areas of creating your business case, you might discover that your plans need some tweaking to make them robust. That’s a good thing! It means that this process has challenged your ideas and has helped you to make them more fit for purpose. If you’d like to get your business case reviewed by one of our Corporate Wellbeing Experts, you can book a free zoom consultation here where we’d be really happy read your proposal and provide some feedback for you to maximise your chances of securing the budget and resources you need to move forward with your plans.
