The number of employers offering workplace wellness initiatives globally has doubled in the past year, showing an increase in employer interest in the concept around the world.
Buck Consultants' Working well: a global survey of health promotion and workplace wellness strategies, showed that - excluding North America where wellbeing strategies are already widespread - 40% of organisations now offer wellness strategies for their employees compared with 20% last year. Workplace wellness has become integral to the benefits strategies of UK employers, with only 3.6% of organisations saying they have no plans to introduce a wellness strategy.
Some 16% of UK respondents have fully implemented a wellness scheme in the workplace, while 34.5% said that they have one partially in place. A further 14.5% said that despite having no strategy in place at present, they intend to develop one in the next two years. Of those UK employers with wellness initiatives already in place, almost half (46%) reported moderate to high reductions in employee absence.†
Furthermore, 61% of employers said employee morale and engagement have been positively affected their wellness programmes. However, 41% of UK respondents have not measured the effect of their programmes on absence rates. Reducing absence (41%), improving engagement (41%) and improving productivity (40%) were cited by European employers as the top drivers for implementing employee wellness strategies.