Wellbeing ‘can cut’ business costs

Company bosses are being told that training staff to manage their own health and wellbeing may not only lower absences but also boost the balance sheet.

Maria Bourke, founder and managing director of Let’s Get Healthy – a company that aims to provide affordable and accessible healthy living – revealed that four-fifths of its business involves organisations looking to address these issues.

She recommended assigning a “health champion”, allowing employees to talk about their problems with peers rather than bosses, as being a good way to tackle absence management and increase fiscal savings.

“We’ve had cases where businesses that have used our programmes, their absence has gone from eight per cent down to 3.5 per cent, saving them hundreds of thousands of pounds,” the expert said.

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Recent data by Aviva revealed that 78 per cent of employees would consider going back to work before fully recovering from an illness or another sort of ailment, with 68 per cent citing money concerns as a reason for an early return to their job.

By Colette Paxton