The Workplace of now - navigating the benefits market.

Jennifer Jackson

Hello and welcome to People Management Insight podcast in association with Zellis, where we'll be discussing the huge wellbeing market. With so much out there, how do you pick the most effective benefits for your employees? I'm Jennifer Jackson, contributing editor to People Management Insight. And here for the third part of our six-part series on 'wellbeing in the workplace of now', I am joined by two expert speakers who will be sharing their guidance and expert advice on wellbeing issues. We've got Amy McKeown, award-winning mental health, health and wellbeing, and women's health consultant and Gethin Nadin, award-winning psychologist, best-selling HR author and Chief Innovation Officer at Zellis. Amy, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself and what you do, please?

 

Amy McKeown

Thank you. lovely to be here. Yeah, so I have worked in health, mental health and wellbeing for 20 years before it was the industry that it is now. And I started out in my early 20s running out a mental health app taking my father's - who was a psychiatrist - knowledge and putting it online. In the days when CD ROMs were high tech and mental health and Facebook weren't yet things. So got a lot of experience in putting in health and mental health strategies and tools into organisations. I then went off to Ernst & Young, where I helped them put in their UK-wide health and mental health programme. And I've more recently worked as an independent, I helped a FTSE 100 write their global wellbeing strategy, and then procure the digital wellbeing tools in that. And I've recently written the EU Parliament's mental health strategy. So lots of different aspects around health, mental health and digital wellbeing that I hope will be relevant for our discussion today.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Lovely. Thanks, Amy. And Gethin, thank you very much for joining us again, what can you tell us about the importance of choosing the right wellbeing tools?

 

Gethin Nadin

Hello, so yeah, thanks for having me back. I think, as you rightly pointed out, I think that the choice for employers when looking at new wellbeing tools is pretty vast and confusing at the moment. And I think throughout the pandemic, kind of traditional brick-and-mortar approaches to wellbeing, it kind of had to give way to technology, as that was the only way that some people were able to get support whilst also maintaining social distance, and etc. So obviously, the adoption of wellbeing Tech, I think, has grown even more over the last few years because of the pandemic. But I think added to this, we've also seen this commodification of wellbeing. So, I think the wellbeing market has exploded. But actually many of the tools and initiatives I've seen are wellbeing kind of by name only, they aren't actually wellbeing tools at all. I think many providers have simply taken the words employee engagement out of their product description and replace those with wellbeing. And very recently had an example of this. I was approached by a payroll giving company who described themselves as financial wellbeing product. And when I challenged that they couldn't actually explain why that was. So I think for many, it's just become a marketing tool. And you know, let's add wellbeing to our product, and it will appear higher in the search rankings. And so I think for those kinds of reasons that present choosing the right wellbeing tool, and making the right decisions is actually incredibly difficult for HR and wellbeing leaders to do. They first have to navigate that sheer volume of options available, and then pick out you know, what are actually the real tools and the ones that are wellbeing by name only? And I think lastly, the most important piece is finding the evidence that the tool you're looking at is actually going to improve anything for your people, which I'm sure is something we'll come on to talk in a little bit more detail shortly.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Thanks Gethin. Yes. So as you say, there are many wellbeing tools out there. And it's really hard to choose a product and know where whether actually it will be effective in your organisation. And there was some stats showing that more than 90,000 digital health apps were released as the pandemic took hold in 2020, an average of 250 per day. And the total figure sits at more than 350,000 According to the IQVIA, many of which focused on wellbeing and mental health. So these figures show that the digital health marketing market is exploding. And it's driven by advances in tech and the impact of the pandemic. And that much of this growth is concentrated in wellbeing and mental health. And it's suggesting this message about about its importance is actually getting through. So increasingly, businesses are offering digital wellbeing to their employees. What do these organisations need to do before rolling out wellbeing tools across their workforces? Amy, can I come to you first on this?

 

 

Yeah, I think you both have made really valid points in that I think the word that struck me that getting used was commodification, which is the commodification of these products. And the fact that we have 90,000 is simply because money is cheap. Right. So when I was running my tech startup in 2003, you had to have a turnover of 3 million before you could get funding. So there wasn't such a thing as seed funding and venture capital. So we've seen the explosion of money invested in tech met with the explosion of interest in wellbeing, which meant that we've now got where we are now. And what is happening is that somebody creating a wellbeing app decides that it's going to be much easier for them to market to businesses and organisations rather than consumers. So they start to approach them. And businesses are seeing digital wellbeing tools as the next step on from mindfulness and fresh fruit and, you know, rolling out Mental Health First Aid, so it's like, okay, either they're getting the apps cheap through other providers, such as health insurance and part of a commodification type way. Or it's like 'everyone's asking for Headspace, or Calm or an app, let's just buy an app.' Right? So I spend the majority of my time saying to organisations,

'you need to really understand what you're trying to do with your strategy. Is it a health strategy? Is it a wellbeing strategy? is it a mental health strategy? What do we need to do and writing your strategy and your organisational plans and processes before you then decide what providers or apps or tools you need in it?’

What we see, and what I see frequently is that somebody - an organisation that wants to make their staff or employees feel looked after, and has, you know, it has had numerous employees asking for the app of the moment, or just buying them. Because it's a quick, easy win to say that they're doing something. They're not actually doing the first piece, which is

“really what behaviours am I trying to drive? And what is my strategic approach to health, mental health and wellbeing? And then what tools do I need? And do I need tools to do that?

It's more of a kind of quick, easy win, which then tends to not be an easy win, because it's really hard to get engagement and people using it, and people are moving on to the next thing. So yeah, it's an interesting time right now.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Yes, thank you, Amy. Gethin, what do you think?

 

Gethin Nadin

Yeah, so I think I'd echo a lot of what Amy said. Over the last couple of years, I've run probably somewhere in the region of 200 wellbeing workshops with global employers. And there's a couple of different things that I've picked out there seem to be pretty universal problems and things that organisations probably need to think about a little bit more than perhaps they are, when looking at rolling out any kind of wellbeing initiative or tool. I think first of all, it's probably to make sure that you've defined wellbeing yourself. There is no currently universally agreed definition of wellbeing let alone workplace wellbeing. So I think making sure you're clear on what wellbeing means to your organisation exactly what Amy said, why it's important too. And, while you're making efforts to improve that, I think that gets you away from just buying stuff because you feel you have to, you've got some kind of mental health or wider wellbeing strategy to place these things into. I also think there's then this assessment of what you currently have in place, almost like an audit.

I think even those organisations just starting out on their wellbeing journey will have some existing tools or benefits in place. And so you can find out, you know, whatever additional services come alongside others you might have bought. So for example, with things like group risk insurance products, like income protection, or critical illness may come with free access to video doctors or free mental health services. And so I think finding out what's in place currently, and if your people are using it will help you find out where you might already be providing some support where you don't necessarily want to duplicate. And I think once you've done those few things, you'll have this framework that you can use to assess any new wellbeing tool or initiative you want to offer. So, you can kind of make sure that you aren't duplicating or wasting money first and foremost. And you'd be amazed at how many times I've seen employers and employees themselves paying for services that they were already getting for free, myself included. And I was supposed to know about this stuff. And I think lastly, I would create a team of people that can help you make buying decisions. I think these could be wider members of the HR team or collection of kind of random selection of employees. But put the tools that you want to buy in front of them, let them test them and feed them back to you. I think there's so many wellbeing apps and tools that any employer buys, you tend to be making a long-term commitment and signing a contract for kind of three years or so. taking your time to make sure you're buying something that your people were actually liking us is going to be really important. And I think also wellbeing is very individual. So, what one person loves and finds useful, another person may not. So, getting the views of multiple people will help you make that buying decision easier. And a little bit of a shameless plug if I may, but I cover all of this and more in my new book ‘a work in progress - unlocking wellbeing to create more resilient and sustainable organisations’, which is going to be out in September this year.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Brilliant, thank you Gethin. Now, as we keep saying there are so many new applications and tools on the market and more are being added all the time. What would your advice be to organisations looking at the wellbeing market? And they're finding themselves really confused by the sheer choice of applications that are available to them? What would you say to them Gethin?

 

Gethin Nadin

Look at the evidence. I think, over the last couple of years, taking an evidence-based approach to HR is becoming increasingly popular, it's featured on the CIPD progression map. And I think this absolutely applies to wellbeing in a very large 2019 study found that mental health apps tended to overplay their efficacy to us as the researchers in this study looked at almost 1500 different mental health apps around the world. And they found that while 64% claimed they have evidence of their effectiveness, only 14% could actually prove any evidence that their app actually worked. A similar study in Australia in 2019, concluded a pretty major review of different app marketplaces like the App Store and Google Play Store. And they were trying to find apps aimed at offering treatment for things like depression, anxiety. And overall, this research found just 3.4% of those apps available had any research to justify their claims of effectiveness.

And again, last year, there was one really, really good landmark study that found that many mental health apps suffer from a lack of underlying evidence base, a lack of scientific credibility and subsequent limited clinical effectiveness. And so as of late last year, late 2021, of the 20,000 mental health apps available for download in the US, just five had been formally vetted and approved by the FDA in America. And so what I think this means for employers is that navigating this new wellbeing market as we've talked about isn't easy and isn't going to get any easier. Just because you go to a conference and hear a psychologist like me talking on behalf of a product or you see a provider with a big shiny stand. And with some big employer customer names on this stand, that doesn't mean the product is effective.

And the last year, I've spent with many large employers who've spent a lot of money really on wellbeing apps that have had little - in one case, zero - engagement at all over the course of last year. So I think if you see a provider you like the look of, don't be afraid to ask them some pointed questions, I think any provider worth their salt is going to be able to give you the answers you're looking for. So, I would recommend, you know, ask them what evidence do you have that their solution is effective? Ask to see that evidence if they've done any kind of trials, if they've got any tie-ups with universities to test their product. Ask to see that, don’t just look at the take-up. How do they measure that people are using the tool and are better off because of it? Ask who was involved in the creation of the product, what experts were used to design the app or write the content? You know, Amy's got a huge amount of experience as we've heard at the start. So, finding somebody like her to be involved in how you make some of these decisions can be really beneficial as well.

So just kicking the tires of those things. Ask for case studies, you know, ask to speak to an existing customer of theirs to find out how they think the tool or app is working and how they've benefited from it. And even ask them questions around you know:

• What do they expect to change in your organisation once employee start using that solution?
• How does that provide it?
• How are they going to measure that success for you?

 

I think we have to get a little bit better at asking some of these awkward questions about you know, why should I buy this? And if you're going to spend, you know, 10s of 1000s of pounds on the solution, you want to make a material difference to your people. I think these are completely legitimate questions to be asking a provider.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Absolutely. Thanks Gethin. Amy, what would your advice be?

 

Amy McKeown

Well, I could not agree more with all of the points that Gethin made well, I spent my 20s, as part of my master's thesis, finding a clinical evidence base for the tool I created. And I am gobsmacked at the kind of wild west of the market at the moment. And even when I've sat in pitches with clients where we've gone through an RFP process for a mental health app, you have market leading names who cannot show any clinical evidence base for their app. Their engagement, you know, at the moment where we are, is that people are trying to build market share fast. So I've have seen very few with any clinical effectiveness or evidence that their app actually changes anything in the mental health of people. Engagement is generally very low, and people will not tell you engagement that six months, 12 months, 24 months for use of their product in organisations. They all sort of fob you off, largely because engagement is very, very low. Which is also why as Gethin said, that you're tied into a three or four year contract because the providers know that that it's unlikely. And I saw the first wave by the way of the market, we're in the second wave now. But when I was running my business in 2003, there are a few products around, that spent a lot of money on getting an evidence base and investment, who then spent a lot of money marketing that products and all went out of business, because they did not make the sales and revenue back for the investment. So everything I've been said, there's a couple of points that I would add to that, which is, you know, all of the questions that get answered about evidence base asking difficult questions, I would, I would say two things. Firstly, and this always goes down really badly, but I'm gonna say it. Why is an organisation buying a mental health app for an employee in the first place? You need to understand your strategy, you need to understand that what you're trying to achieve. But I think then rather than going through this process, where things try and get trendy for a moment, and we don't have a lot of evidence base, we're talking about organisational mental health. You know, most people in organisations are employees and have salaries, something like Calm or Headspace cost one or two pounds a month, if you're buying it as a consumer. So I think there's a really valid question for organisations as to why they're doing this in the first place. Why not just give each employee a couple of pounds to actually buy an app that they can use themselves? Or actually, why? Why are you going down this route in the first place? So that would be the first thing I asked because it is the Wild West, and it's a changing market and things are trendy, you know, what is the value of providing it? I think there's a lot to be said in all sorts of wellbeing providers, where you either give an employee money to buy it themselves, or suggests they buy it themselves. Or when I was at Ernst & Young, everybody wanted earphones and Fitbits, we negotiated an employee discount for our employees that wanted to buy one, we did not buy them for them, you know, so there are different models that I think that we should look at, rather than just assuming it's appropriate. And the other piece I wanted to just talk about was data. So we've got all the clinical effectiveness and engagement. But where we are now, if you're really blunt about it, is that the people who have taken on money to buy these apps and tools are businesses, if you have taken on investment, that investor expects returns of you know, certain amounts and multiples in order to reclaim that investment. They want to sell their business, and they want to sell their business, which is your data. So when I was at Ernst & Youngs again, virtual GPS were quite trendy, and my master's was in health informatics. So basically digital health is squirrelled away in the user agreements are statements about who owns the mental health data on a tool like this. And I think this is really relevant because somebody from HR or wellbeing lead with the help of procurement doesn't often know what questions to ask around health and mental health apps. But there's this whole piece about are you comfortable for an app because many of them own the health data of the people that are using the app, some don't some have data processes. But I think it's a really valid point; are you as an HR person or as a wellbeing lead or as an organisation comfortable with buying a tool for your employees to use where an external third party provider is owning the mental health data of your employees? And what legal repercussions are there on that? I think this whole piece is missed because we're so busy talking about how what the latest fad is or how it's going to improve wellbeing. But these are businesses that are building data set to sell that is their business model. And actually, I think from an organisational legal perspective, and an organisational sort of moral perspective, we need to be asking that, you know, why are we buying them? Do we need to? Why are employees not buying what they want themselves, especially ones who are on reasonable salaries? And do we even want to start opening the sort of can of worms around who owns the mental health data of our employees because there are legal repercussions to that.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Thanks, Amy raised some very interesting issues there. When choosing which tools to make available to workforce is only part of the challenge. How can organisations monitor how effective these applications actually are? And how often should organisations be collecting feedback from their staff about the tools themselves? What do you think Amy?

 

Amy McKeown

Well, I think Gethin covered a lot of these really nicely in his answer to the previous question, which is how effective they are, you know, kind of you wouldn't buy anything else with an ROI without an ROI. So you'd want to see, you know that it was returning money, but also you'd want to make sure people are using it. The engagement is high and As you know, as Katherine said that there is actually an impact on the health, mental health wellbeing of your employees, which is something that's often missed, you know, I, I see very few providers that can actually show that use of their tool drove measurable change in the health or mental health or wellbeing. And, you know, how often should organisations be collecting feedback from the staff about these tools? All the time. I mean, I am enough of a dinosaur in this industry to see that sort of health and mental health and wellbeing how it tends to sort of move is that the wellbeing strategy is used every couple of years for staff or employees to encourage the employer to buy the latest trend. So for example, when I started out in 2003, everyone was sat on Swiss balls, there was a trend just sort of like gym memberships, and standup desks and treadmill desks for all of these tools were things that the employee wanted and wanted, but saw that actually, the wellbeing strategy was a way of getting the organisation to pay for something they wanted themselves. Hence my point about why don't you buy your own app? But in the mental health world, you know, when I first started, I was stressed. So we had resilience, there was a corporate athlete phase, then there was a sort of positivity and energy phase. And now we've been in mindfulness for a long time. So mindfulness, and then mindfulness has morphed into mental health apps. So, you know, there's always been the case that that wellbeing strategies are often driven by employees putting pressure on the organisation to buy stuff. So I think collecting feedback is really important to find out if staff are using them. But I think, you know, a really honest two-way-conversation should be ongoing all the time between organisation and employee about what they need, and why, and when, and actually, realistically, is this? I mean, I spend a lot of my time - as Gethin did - I think how he described and how he works with employers is very similar to myself, you know, I start with what is health and mental health or wellbeing to you? let's put guard rails around that, like, what is our strategy trying to drive? How are we weaving it into job roles and performance management? And then what providers do we need? But I think the first piece, what is health and mental health to you is a fascinating one, because I've seen wellbeing spend going out on things like manicures, or puppies in the office, or someone coming in for a massage. So a really honest, clear, like permanent feedback about what employees need, but also what the organisational policy is for. It should be ongoing all the time. And, you know, looking at what things are in place, including apps should be part of the ongoing conversation.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Okay, thanks, Amy. Gethin, what do you think? What's your perspective there on how often organisations should be collecting feedback from their staff about these tools? all the time? Or any particular time?

 

Gethin Nadin

Yeah. So there's this kind of great debate that has formed a lot of what I've been talking about at conferences this year. And that's really ‘Yeah, how do we measure the effectiveness of wellbeing at work? How do we measure the effectiveness of the apps and the tools and the policies etc, we've got in place?’ I think, one, we've got all of those things in place that can impact wellbeing. So how can we possibly measure all of them and how effective they are? And I guess, the reality is, I don't think we can measure them, I think you've got so many things that influence somebody's wellbeing that, you know, there's kind of so many data points, it'd be too cumbersome, and possibly impossible to measure them all. And added to this, I think the old objective ways of measuring wellbeing at work, like looking at absences and sickness rates, I just don't think they're effective anymore. And I don't think they tell us the full story.

So recently, I've been leaning much more towards subjective measures, which is, you know, asking people what they think of the support we provide, is it useful? It’s exactly like Amy was just saying, kind of asking people what wellbeing means to them and what support they need. And I think, you know, I guess me and Amy, I think and, and others, like us, you know, start to see stuff like subjective wellbeing as emergent, as this kind of arguably more successful way of measuring wellbeing at work. And it's taking the place of those other common metrics like tech engagement and absence rates. I think most modern digital wellbeing interventions in the workplace tend to measure their success by taking a snapshot at a point in time. And this is often looking at things like traditional engagement metrics, like logins to an app or downloads of an app. But I don't think this technology-led way of measuring engagement actually works that well with wellbeing. I think, you know, a login or time spent using a digital health platform might not really tell us much about how we support an individual, or how their wellbeing has changed as a result, the support we provided. And if we think a little bit about kind of how psychologists tend to view wellbeing it's generally about how people experience their lives, not those objective facts of their life. So, I think this is important because we take as a starting point, this idea that people have a preference over pretty fundamental aspects of their own wellbeing. And this theory is grounded in economic principle of revealed preference, which states that, you know, when a person has an informed choice, their view is the best criteria for judging what increases their wellbeing. And so I think subjective wellbeing measures an employee's perceptions, not their utility. And I think that's important. So when we do obtain feedback? and regularly I think is really important to any wellbeing tool app we buy, you know, we don't want to get to 12 months in and find out, nobody was engaging with the tool, we want to ask them within the first month of launching it. And again, at regular intervals, as Amy says, you know, if you don't get the engagement or positive feedback you expected, you can then start to work with your provider to get that engagement up, you know, they might be able to run extra communications or promotional work with you, or workshops to encourage people to use the app or whatever it might be. So that regular feedback, you know, asking people, getting that subjective wellbeing view is really, really important. And I think a really good example is, if you don't do that, you know, imagine if you rolled out a new mental health app in January 2020. And a month later asked employees how they were but then did nothing for the rest of the year, that data point wouldn't have told you anything as by March that year, the pandemic was in full force, and everybody's wellbeing priorities changed overnight. So, I think asking people their views, and asking them regularly is really important and adjusting your strategy accordingly, based on the feedback that you get at those regular intervals.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Great, thank you, Gethin. It's very unlikely that one application or tool will suit all employees, as you both put across quite clearly now. So I think, you know, should we employers be offering a range of tools and applications suited for a whole range of conditions? And how important is that honest dialogue with people, I think you both of you have said, it is important to establish their needs, before pushing out one or more wellbeing apps. Do you feel you've already answered this question? Or do you have more to say on this?

 

Amy McKeown

I'll give you a reflection. I mean, think about how software sold right? So there is this loop about,

“okay, you've got 10,000 people in your organisation, therefore, I will send you a licence for £10,000 for 10,000 people.”

And then organisation says,

“Well, what if only 3% of people use it?”

So I sat in this loop, and it's a still loop going on for people selling these products. So then you go down the.

“Well, why don't we pay when people use it?” which doesn't work either. Because the HR team, we've got no incentive to promote the use of a tool if every time someone uses it, they pay. So if you think about how software businesses sell themselves, it's generally a kind of like, commodified, commodified product, that's what I was gonna say, was, when I put my tool up and running into an organisation, I sold to, you know, a police force where there are 2000 people in the police force. But actually, what we found over time of running for about three years was that it didn't have high engagement, but it prevented five suicides.

So by having it in there and having a payable for people, what we found was this was a, it was a police force with a very large geographical area, whereby if someone was in need, and in crisis, they would go on, use my app, and then get themselves into occupational health. So we found that the use of this tool was actually not what we planned it to be. Likewise, I'm working with another organisation that's created a femtech app that specialises in supporting people, men and women, but predominantly women through pregnancy loss and pregnancy ending. So it's a very specialised tool. So I think there's something very important about looking at your demographics. And this is what I help organisations with with their strategies. That's why we say write the strategy First, figure out what you need, and then find the right appropriate tools for that. And for your demographics. It's not about you know, the way that businesses are sold, like most of these apps are sold, you know, as getting said as commoditized tools for making mental health accessible for everybody. Actually, that's not the case. There are unique needs, and there are unique tools that will fill those needs that need to be built in properly.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Great, thanks, Amy. I'm just gonna repeat that question and then go to Gethin. So, it's very unlikely that one application or tool will suit all employees. So should we employers be offering a range of tools and applications suited for a whole range of conditions? And how important is an honest dialogue with your people to establish their needs before even pushing out one or more wellbeing apps? Gethin, Could I come to you on that first please?

 

Gethin Nadin

Yeah, so I think it's obviously really important to have that honest dialogue and get the people involved in some of the decisions we make so actually solving problems for them that they want us to solve, or offering the kind of support they want to get for their needs in the workplace. But I think it's also important to note that you know, our individual wellbeing, our needs change, and they change often, and at an organisational level, this means that you're trying to help a multitude of people with some very different needs. And so I think we've got no other option, but to look at multiple ways to support people. And so for example, you know, I'm spending time with customers are asking, you know,

“Do you have ways to support people's wellbeing differently based on their gender or sexuality or race?” And I think it's also important to understand that people want to engage in wellbeing in different ways, too. So for example, some of the latest research I've been reading shows that whilst the under-40’s are now for far more likely to be open and talk about their mental health, they're actually increasingly less likely to ask for support with it. So how do we offer tools that our people can use perhaps privately at home without needing to speak to somebody, whilst at the same time offering a maybe vocal support or an opportunity for somebody to speak to somebody if they would rather engage in that way at work? So, yeah, I think it's really important that we think about those differing needs of people based on who they are, but also how they want to engage with us in the workplace. And have all that in mind when you roll out that multitude of different applications or tools.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Thanks Gethin, did you have anything to add there, Amy.

 

Amy McKeown

So yes, I'm in agreement with with guessing here in the organization's or not one thing, they're many different people with totally different needs and demographics. So having a range of tools and applications that suit different people at different times at different points of their journey, different areas, is really important. So, for example, I'm doing some work at the moment with a femtech tool. That is a very important tool for supporting women, but also men through an eight-week programme after pregnancy loss or the end of a pregnancy, which is very niche, but a really important thing for people who need support during that time. Likewise, how organisations, you know, there are different people -. We, for example, when I used to run my business, I had a online mental health tool delivering kind of preventative mental health to a police force, which was 2000 people spread over a large geographic area. Now the way that we tend to buy and sell tools is especially in organisations is we look at the number of people per head, and then we sell a licence for the number of people, because the other way of doing it is to be paying it through use. And you find that in an organisational setting, that model doesn't really work either. Because why would HR promote a tool that they have to pay every time someone use so the the ongoing discussion in the sort of tech world market is what business model is best. And the one that tends to work most in organisations is, you know, we sell per number of people in the organisation, which is why the discussion then becomes about engagement and use and how many logins they are. Now, in this place for us, we didn't get the engagement that I was expecting in terms of numbers, and this was 2003. So there was really no comparisons out there. But what we did find was that in three years, it prevented five suicides. So although actually, the people weren't logging on and use it as I had anticipated on a daily basis to talk about mental health, when in crisis at home, they did use it, and then they use it to refer themselves into occupational health where we've got testimonials from them that if they hadn't had access to the tool, they would have taken their own life.

So there is definitely a range of need. There's a different range of uses. There's a range of demographics. And it's really been very clear. And this is why I spend a lot of time with people about strategies and talk about the strategy. First, is you need to know what you're doing and what your strategy is and what your demographics is, and then find, as Gethin said, a range of tools and applications that have different uses for different needs for different groups. And you can only really get into that conversation if you are having an honest dialogue about needs, but also about once and then, you know coming from there, but I think there's also a needs versus one, like what does the organisation need to provide? And what does it want to provide? I think those are the key questions as well.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Excellent. Thanks, Amy. It feels like we're really making progress with talking about wellbeing in the workplace. But there's a lot still to do. Isn't there it? Is it fair to say that these tools are only part of a wider proposition that organisations need to consider and what else should be part of that wellbeing and wellness package. Amy, what do you think?

 

Amy McKeown

Well, yes, I mean, you know, we've talked about it before, but it's so important, I think for an organisation to really pin down what they're trying to achieve. You know, I speak to a lot of organisations where the - when I asked them what they're trying to achieve in a mental health network, it's to reduce the stigma and raise awareness, which is a kind of wishy washy statement about getting people to talk about it. But you can't really measure or have any idea when it's been successful. And what is mental health in the workforce? So with all of these things, whether it's mental health or wellbeing or health, it's being really clear as to what you are doing. And then writing a strategy based on that to achieve the aim of whatever it is. I spend a lot of my time explaining the difference between activities and Tactics versus Strategy. your strategy is to actually achieve something as opposed to a lot of wellness programmes I see which are more sort of a list of tactics as opposed to a strategy. So when I work with organisations, it's ‘what do you want to achieve?’ but then it's looking at the strategy overall, so providers fit into that. But also how jobs are structured? line manager training? relationship with line managers? Having really clear care pathways, how this fits into your performance management? what policies you have? all of these are how we change organisational culture around it, not just sort of tactics. And I think that also I'm increasingly having conversations and enjoying having conversations with employers about the difference of wellbeing versus health and mental health. You know, I think we are going to see health and mental health being the biggest societal issues that we deal with over the next sort of 10/20/30 years, because we're on the back of a pandemic. The NHS is totally backed up. And we've kind of always fudged that conversation between who is responsible for health and who pays for health care? Isn't the individual? Is it the organisation? Or is it the government because we've always had the NHS and the way the NHS works is I don't have to look after my health but and there's someone who will pay for health care if I get sick? Well, that is broken. And we saw during the pandemic, the start of organisations realising that they're having to make policy around health care, you saw it with vaccines, you saw it with kind of COVID rules. But I mean, I work with employers, and I'm talking about them procuring their own primary and secondary care, you know, is it cheaper for you to buy a GP service and manage your employees through a GP service than wait for somebody who's off sick to go through the NHS, likewise, commissioning secondary care? You know, private health insurance is very commoditized. To all of these discussions, you know, who pays for what? who drives health behaviours? and are ones that are going to come up? I've had a numerous-time conversation with employers about buying things such as anti-smoking, for example. And when I start to talk about, you know, should you be offering employees anti-smoking or, or things like that? There's often

“well, I can't tell employees what to do”

But I'm saying,

“Well, actually, you're paying for their health insurance. So you're paying, are you prepared to pay a higher premium for an employee that smokes, are you prepared to do that?”

And then it's a kind of penny drops are actually we're paying money. So we've never really had honest conversations around what health, mental health and wellbeing are, who is responsible for them and who pays for them, and that is only going to increase as, sadly, the NHS is more and more problematic. So I think it's all part of a wider proposition. But I'm liking the fact that the conversation is starting to move away from wellbeing, more into health, mental health and wellbeing because I think wellbeing is a bit of a catch all for not really wanting to talk about health and mental health properly.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Yes, Thanks, Amy. Some tough thoughts there to be had, Gethin what do you think?

 

Gethin Nadin

Yeah, I think we talked about this commodification of well, being from the employer point of view quite a lot. But I also think that's kind of happened to us as consumers, I think, employees have been led to believe that wellbeing is a way to kind of counteract the negative impact that work can have on us. And I don't think that's right, I think employers should be offering tools and initiatives that support their people through the things that life's gonna throw at them. But I think all of this conversation has to start with making sure that work isn't the problem in the first place. And I don't think we can continue to do what some large American employees have done this year and find out that our people are burnt out and then give them paid time off to recover. I don't think that's done anything to solve the problems of burnout in the first place. And I think burnout is a really good example. It's something we almost try to tell the individual to solve. Yet the evidence is pretty clear that burnout at work is almost always created by the way we've designed the workplace. So things like overwork, lack of communication, poor management, lack of recognition. So I think wellbeing has to start with making sure we aren't doing any harm. So that wellbeing strategy has to include:

• how do we write policies?
• How do we communicate with our people?
• How often they recognized?
• Is their pay fair?
• Do we have the kind of right policies in place to support diversity?
•  

 

And so I think there's this balance that's required of making sure that work becomes a positive force in people's lives, and that we limit the negative impact of work on people. But then we also offer the tools, apps, etc, that will support people through life stresses. So we offer support for carers for those in debt for those going through a relationship breakup. And we aren't just blindly offering things like a mindfulness app, we've actually thought about how does that fit into our wellbeing strategy? And what problems do we think is going to solve for support for our people?

 

Jennifer Jackson

Great, thanks, Gethin. So looking ahead, how do you both see this wellbeing market developing in the coming years? And what are some of the trends you'd encourage getting?

 

Gethin Nadin

I think we're starting to see a map. And hopefully, with podcasts like this, we're starting to help the buyer become far more discerning them than they've ever been. And it's like, hey, HR wellbeing leads, I think you're now in this period of quiet reflection, where they're looking at the ways they had to quickly support their people during the pandemic. And now making sure that those discussions are still right for the future.

So I often describe it, as you know, lots of people during the pandemic had to kind of clamber around and find the fire extinguisher and learn how to use it. Whereas now, actually, you know, we're not in that moment of panic, we don't have to react quickly, we can kind of make a more long-term commitment to employee wellbeing. And so along with this, I think we have employers who are now not only keener and more primed than ever to commit to employee wellbeing, they hopefully have the attention of their seniors and board members. And I think with that attention, hopefully come things like bigger budgets or smarter budgets, and that will come the need to make better wellbeing decisions. So Amy mentioned it before, you know, ROI, lots of wellbeing, people don't like the idea that there needs to be an ROI attached to it. But anyone that knows anything about business knows that we have to justify almost every cost, we have got kind of investors and shareholders to please so I think, you know, as we spend more money on wellbeing, we have to make better wellbeing decisions, we have to become a more discerning buyer. And so I think, you know, more and more professionals are taking an evidence-based approach and far less likely to be wooed by a new shiny mental health app. And the future as I see it, you know, is wellbeing-led, hopefully in every organisation, but looks at the organization's decisions through a wellbeing lens. So when we write a home working policy, the wellbeing team looks over and signs it off. When we decide how managers are trained, the wellbeing team is involved in that. And when we make any decision that affects an employee, we look at that decision through a lens of wellbeing. And I think once that started to happen, we reached this kind of panacea of wellbeing at work. And I am starting to see that happen. So I'm really optimistic about the future of wellbeing at work. And I think it's going to be one that's driven far less by app providers, and more by those that actually understand and want to improve wellbeing at work.

 

Jennifer Jackson

Great. Amy, what do you think?

 

Amy McKeown

Yeah, I couldn't agree with Gethin more. So, rather than repeating what he has said, you know, I think I've been in this world a long time. And I think what has happened is the market has grown very fast and very quickly. And if you look at the sorts of people in wellbeing lead jobs, a lot of them have come from HR background, so it's taken a bit of time for people to understand what questions to ask HR what matters because, you know, it's like, health and mental health and wellbeing often fit in the organisation, often in HR, but it's sort of it's a random thing that fits between many different areas. You know, HR, diversity, inclusiveness, employee engagement, health and safety, and has predominantly been HR people taking wellbeing lead roles. So, as the market has developed and is developing, we are getting more discernment, we're getting more understanding of what tools are, we're getting people who are learning more about how to ask questions. And, you know, it's always baffles me that, you know, you have organisations that agonise over creating business cases for job roles will spend, you know, 10s of 1000s on providers that aren't very good. And also with things like health insurance. One of the exercises I do with a lot of organisations is how much is health, mental health and wellbeing costing you at this point? Let's add together what you're already spending on providers and absence and then we can rather than thinking about finding budget, we can think about reallocating budget from commoditised products that no one's using and aren't working into really strategic use of money for wellbeing interventions. So as Gethin said, I would expect to see more of that. But I also expect to see harder barriers to entry to the wellbeing App Market. And you know, we're already starting to see it specific niche apps. So we're seeing things like Hertility and femtech apps Calmer. But I was really interested in this conversation I was having with pregnancy loss app, because we're starting to see specific niche apps for specific reasons and demographics, which I think will be embedded more because it has been you know, panic, oh, ‘let's just buy everyone a mindfulness app, because there's a few well-known ones, and it's a pandemic, and we want to show we care’ to ‘actually no, let's think about strategic use of money and direction to build a long term sustainable strategy that actually has an impact and get move away from contracts that are not impacting.’

 

Jennifer Jackson

Great. Thank you, Amy, and Gethin. I hope you've all enjoyed listening to our speakers today, and that they've provided you with some useful information to better assist your teams. If you'd like to read more about zealous research, please do visit www.zealous.com. And do look out for the next episode in our six-part ‘wellbeing in the workplace of now’ series in partnership with Zellis, which is coming soon. And you can also listen again to episodes right here on People Management Insight.

Well, thank you to Amy and Gethin for being excellent guests today, providing us with your insight and expertise about this rapidly growing market. And thank you to Zellis for partnering with us on this series. I'm Jennifer Jackson. Thank you for listening and have a good day.