Let me describe a ritual you may recognise. Once a year, an organisation books a motivational speaker. He is expensive, he is polished, and for ninety glorious minutes the conference hall believes in itself. There are tears. There is a standing ovation. There is a hashtag. And by the following Thursday, the only measurable outcome is a lanyard in a drawer and a fruit bowl in reception that nobody asked for.
Then the budget holder writes “wellbeing initiative – delivered” in a spreadsheet, and everyone agrees not to ask the obvious question: did any of it actually work?
I am going to be blunt with you, because the numbers deserve bluntness. British organisations are spending serious money on wellbeing – and most of them could not evidence a single outcome if their auditor, their board, or their own conscience demanded it.
The bill nobody itemises
Let us start with what doing nothing – or doing something unmeasured, which is remarkably similar – actually costs. Deloitte’s 2024 research puts the price of poor mental health to UK employers at £51 billion a year. Not million. Billion. And here is the detail that should make every leader wince: the biggest slice is not absence. It is presenteeism – around £24 billion of people showing up hollow-eyed and running on fumes, physically at their desks while their capacity quietly leaves the building. Add roughly £7 billion in absenteeism and £20 billion in staff turnover, and you have a slow leak that would trigger a crisis meeting in any other column of the accounts.
Meanwhile, CIPD’s 2025 research found average sickness absence has climbed to 9.4 days per employee per year – up from 5.8 days in 2022. That is not a blip. That is a trajectory. And 64% of HR professionals report stress-related absence in their organisation, with heavy workloads the most commonly cited cause. None of this is a mystery. It is measured, published and sitting in plain sight.
Now for the savage part
Here is the statistic my whole working life orbits around, and I want you to sit with it for a moment. According to CIPD, 64% of organisations are taking steps to identify or reduce workplace stress – but only 50% believe those efforts are actually effective.
Read that again. Half the market is spending money on interventions that, by their own admission, they don’t believe are working. Not “can’t prove are working” – though they mostly can’t – but don’t even believe are working. Imagine applying that standard anywhere else in the business. “We’ve bought a fleet of vans; we’re fairly sure some of them drive.” “We’ve hired a sales team; whether they sell is honestly anyone’s guess.” It would be laughable. Yet in wellbeing, it is Tuesday.
And I say this as someone who loves this industry, who has felt the energy in the room while giving a talk: an inspiring talk with no baseline, no follow-through and no measurement is not an investment. It is theatre with a duty-of-care costume on. The applause is real. The change is unverified. And unverified, increasingly, means indefensible – because the regulator has stopped accepting good intentions as evidence, and your board should too.
The fix is almost embarrassingly simple
Measure before. Intervene with purpose. Measure after. Write it down.
That is it. That is the whole scandalous secret. Take a proper baseline of the pressure your people are under – against a recognised framework, not a smiley-face survey. Choose interventions that respond to what the baseline reveals, rather than what looked impressive at someone else’s conference. Then measure again, honestly, and document what changed and what didn’t. Because “what didn’t” is not failure – it is the most valuable management information you will collect all year, and it is precisely what separates organisations managing psychosocial risk from organisations decorating it.
And the glorious irony? Evidence is not just a shield – it is a return. Deloitte’s same research found an average return of £4.70 for every £1 invested in supporting workforce mental health. Done properly, this is one of the best-performing investments available to any organisation. Done as theatre, it is one of the most quietly wasteful.
A question for you
So here is my challenge, and I offer it with love and a raised eyebrow. Look at your last wellbeing initiative – the speaker, the app, the awareness week – and ask yourself three questions. What did we measure before? What did we measure after? Could I show the difference to my board without blushing? If the honest answer is “nothing, nothing, and absolutely not”, then congratulations: you have just carried out your first evaluation, and it took thirty seconds. The next one can be better.
Your people are worth more than a hashtag and a fruit bowl. They are worth knowing about – properly, rigorously, kindly. The organisations that thrive over the next decade will be the ones who treat their people’s resilience with the same seriousness as their profit margin, and who can prove it.
At ReSpeak, measurement is not an add-on – it is the whole point. The ISO 45003-aligned programmes we deliver start with a baseline, ends with documented outcomes, and are built around the HSE Management Standards, so your wellbeing spend finally comes with receipts. If you are ready to stop performing wellbeing and start evidencing it, I would love to talk.