Employee wellbeing strategy: a UK employer’s guide

An employee wellbeing strategy is a structured plan designed to protect and improve employees’ physical, mental, financial, and social wellbeing at work. It also sets out the organisation’s priorities, responsibilities, and support available to employees, while establishing how progress and impact will be measured. 

Employee wellbeing is vitally important because, if not kept in check, poor health, work-related stress, or employee burnout can create measurable costs due to sickness absence, reduced capacity, and employee turnover. For a CHRO or HR Director, investing in employee wellbeing initiatives means connecting wellbeing activities with workforce risks and business outcomes, rather than treating it as an employee perk.

In 2025, it was estimated that over 148 million working days were lost to sickness or injury across the UK, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is the equivalent to an average of 4.4 days per worker and a sickness absence rate of 2%. It’s also estimated that mental health conditions accounted for 8.9% of absence occurrences.

Work-related stress is a hot topic too, with the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) estimating that nearly a million workers (964,000) were affected by work-related stress, depression, or anxiety in 2024 / 2025, resulting in 22 million working days lost and accounting for 52% of all work-related ill health.

The employer’s case for including an employee wellbeing strategy as a matter of course is apparent in organisational data. The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development’s (CIPD) 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work report found that the average employee absence had rocketed to 9.4 days per employee, the highest level recorded in over 15 years. 

For a board, this makes wellbeing relevant for productivity, workforce capacity, and the cost of replacing or retaining employees, not just for the employee experience. 

A robust employee wellbeing strategy should incorporate the 4 pillars of wellbeing, which are physical, mental, financial, and social. If treated separately, there’s a risk of creating gaps, as pressure in one area frequently affects another, so all 4 need to be covered.

1. Physical wellbeing

The ONS estimated that employees with long-term health conditions had a 4% sickness absence rate in 2025, compared with 1% among workers without them. So a physical wellbeing strategy should address prevention and practical conditions that enable employees to be healthy at work. Depending on what type of workforce you have, this can include workplace ergonomics, health assessments, occupational health, musculoskeletal support, healthy working environments, and physical activity.

Start with workforce evidence, not a generic benefits catalogue. By delving deep and examining the real reasons for absence, occupational health referrals, and workplace injuries, you’ll be able to identify where physical health presents the greatest organisational risk. Combining this with employee feedback and working patterns will give you the full picture of what you have to deal with.  

Your strategy should consider how the company supports people to remain in work, not just how it responds if someone is absent.

2. Mental wellbeing

Mental wellbeing should combine prevention, early intervention, and access to appropriate support, and not just rely on an employee assistance programme (EAP). A credible employee wellbeing strategy should address the causes of poor mental health within the workplace combined with individual support. This means giving managers the skills to have appropriate conversations and create easy routes where employees can raise concerns without fear of reprisals. Managers should be trained to provide access to professional support where appropriate, and also examine workload, job design, organisational change, work relationships, and management practices.

Acas recommends that employers address the causes of work-related stress via risk assessments and surveys, while trained managers can handle issues such as conflict and change. If the workload, poor management, or poorly handled organisational change are driving stress, the employee wellbeing strategy needs interventions at organisational level as well as robust support for individuals.

3. Financial wellbeing

Financial pressure can affect employees’ health, concentration, engagement, and ability to perform their role to the highest of standards. A financial wellbeing strategy should go beyond salary and any benefits, so employees can fully understand and manage their finances at different stages of their careers. Practical measures include financial education, guidance on pensions, savings schemes, salary-linked benefits, flexible pay arrangements, and debt support. What is offered as part of a financial wellbeing package will depend on workforce demographics and what is already provided. There is a clear gap between the importance of the issue and organisational provision. The 2026 Reward Survey from the CIPD found that just 15% of UK companies, that were surveyed, had a formal financial wellbeing policy.

Another report from the CIPD in 2025 found that 31% of employees cited money worries as having a negative effect on their performance at work. This rose to 37% among those earning below £40,000, giving HR a stronger board-level argument to implement financial wellbeing strategies. Any strategy shouldn’t presume that higher earners are devoid of being affected by financial pressures though. Support should be designed around financial circumstances and life stages, instead of making assumptions based purely on salary.

4. Social wellbeing

The social side of wellbeing should focus on if employees have meaningful work relationships, connection, and a sense of belonging when in the workplace. This is especially important for those companies that adopt hybrid working models, where opportunities for informal interaction are reduced.

Interventions that can help include setting up employee networks, mentoring schemes, peer-to-peer support, team-based activities, and regular contact with managers. The idea isn’t to force interaction, but to create natural conditions and a workplace culture where employees can build supportive working relationships.

Do employees have sufficient connection and support to do their work effectively? If not, social wellbeing should be considered, along with the HSE’s approach to relationships and support.

Use workforce evidence, define measurable priorities, assign ownership, and match interventions to identified risks to build a strategy that’s a management framework, not just a list of benefits.

• Start with a baseline, covering absence, staff engagement, turnover, occupational health information, employee survey results, existing benefit usage, and available demographic data. Look for differences between departments, locations, job types, and employee groups where the data can be used lawfully and appropriately. 

• Identify the highest-priority risks. For example, a high level of absences in a particular function could indicate a heavy workload or physical demands; low engagement with a high turnover could point towards management or career issues, and survey responses on stress may require a deeper delve into work design.

• Set 3 to 5 objectives initially, rather than trying to improve every aspect of the wellbeing strategy at once. Objectives might include strengthening the support for employees with long-term health conditions, reducing avoidable absences, improving manager capability, or increasing access to financial support. Each objective should have an owner, a defined intervention, a timescale, and a measure of what success looks like. This makes the strategy easier to take to the board because the proposal shows what the organisation will do, why it’s doing it, who’s accountable, and how progress will be judged.

UK employers have a legal duty to protect employees from health and safety risks, including work-related stress. They also have a duty of care to do all they reasonably can to support employee health and wellbeing, according to Acas. Guidance from Acas also includes an explanation of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, protecting employees from the risk of stress at work, while the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires employers to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of health and safety risks.

While a wellbeing employee strategy doesn’t replace these legal duties, it can provide the outline by which the business identifies any risks, provides support, and demonstrates how those risks are managed.

Work-related stress should be treated as a risk-management issue, not just a mental health one. The HSE Management Standards provide a practical framework for doing this, by identifying 6 areas of work design associated with stress.

• Demands.
• Control.
• Support.
• Relationships.
• Role.
• Change.

This framework uses surveys, employee data, and conversations to identify underlying causes, and figure out practical ways in which to improve and combat work-related stress.

This is a useful test for HR. If wellbeing activities focus on topics such as resilience training, mindfulness, or individual support, but doesn’t delve into workload, autonomy, management support, relationships, and role clarity, it may fall short as it will be addressing the consequences but not the risks. While the HSE says employers don’t have to follow that particular approach legally, it’s best practice to implement the Management Standards approach due to it being a suitable and sufficient method.

Employee wellbeing should be measured through a balanced scorecard of workforce outcomes, employee experience, and intervention activities, as no metric on its own can either tell the whole story or if a strategy is working. The most useful dashboard combines absence rates, turnover, engagement scores, and take-up rates.

Absence rates inform on workforce health, but not its cause.

• Track overall sickness absence, absence frequency, and length, then segment the data via function, location, and the reason for each absence. This comes into its own when HR leaders can pick out patterns and investigate whether they relate to workload, management, or physical conditions.

Turnover tells you about retention, but isn’t a direct wellbeing measure.

• Track voluntary turnover and, if possible, regretted turnover, and reasons for leaving. A decrease in staff turnover may be beneficial, though it’s often not related to wellbeing, but a reflection of labour-market conditions, recruitment freezes, or other factors.

Engagement scores tell you about employee experience, but must be specific.

• If an engagement score is too broad, it can hide important issues, so questions that cover workload, manager support, belonging, and confidence in organisational support should be included.

Take-up rates tell you whether support is being accessed, but not if it’s effective.

• Monitor the take-up rate of employee assistance programmes (EAPs), coaching, financial education, and other interventions, but don’t assume that a high usage of these means the strategy is successful. A high take-up rate can point towards either effective access or an underlying need, while low take-up can indicate low awareness or a stigma attached to certain interventions.

The board needs to look behind what the data can’t prove. For example, a reduction in absence can’t automatically be attributed to a wellbeing programme, and a higher engagement score doesn’t necessarily demonstrate a financial return.

Deliver wellbeing support through a combination of manager capability, organisational interventions, and individual support to enable the advancement of careers. Don’t expect HR to provide every intervention directly. Digital resources, coaching, peer networks, occupational health, and external professional services can extend capacity, but they should sit within a coherent strategy.

For a large organisation, scalability matters because 1-2-1 interventions are expensive and difficult to access consistently. Careerminds offers a 30:1 coaching ratio.

Can employees access the right level of support at the right time? A good operating model could use self-service resources for lower-level needs, manager support for early intervention, specialist services for more complex situations. and organisational interventions where there are systemic risks.

The board needs to understand what wellbeing provision will achieve. An EAP, coaching programme, or wellbeing platform are all inputs, while potential outputs are improved access, earlier intervention, reduced risk, or better employee outcomes.

A. An employee wellbeing strategy is an organisation’s approach to identifying and addressing factors that affect employees’ health, wellbeing, and their ability to flourish while at work. It brings together practical actions across physical, mental, financial, and social wellbeing, with clear ownership and measures that assess whether these actions make a difference.

A. Wellbeing matters because poor health and work-related stress can contribute to sickness absence, reduced performance, employee turnover, and workforce risk. For employers, an employee wellbeing strategy provides a structured way to identify risks and decide where intervention is most needed in order to have an organisational benefit.

A. This can be through a combination of capable managers, appropriate policies, accessible support, and targeted interventions that help across physical, mental, financial, and social wellbeing. The most effective approach looks at the causes of poor wellbeing while providing support for those employees who need it the most.

A. UK employers have legal duties relating to employees’ health and safety, including assessing and managing risks from work-related stress. Employers also have a duty of care towards employees’ health, safety, and wellbeing, while HSE guidance provides the Management Standards as a practical framework for identifying and managing work-related stress risks. 

The question for the board isn’t, “What wellbeing benefits should we offer?”, but “What risks are we trying to change, and how will we know if our strategy has changed them?”

If your organisation is considering redefining your workforce, and is looking for services to help with this, then contact us at the earliest opportunity to find out more.