So you now know why calculating the ROI for your wellness programme is important. 

Now the question is, how do you start doing it?

There are three major steps you need to follow to be able to calculate your return on investment, and reap the benefits for your business;

Recognise the problems of mental health

Mental Health problems can be extremely problematic to your organisation when it comes to managing your staff, with over a fifth of employees struggling with poor mental health in any given year.

Proactively looking out for the signs and symptoms of someone struggling with a mental health problem in your business, and educating yourself on the most common mental health problems that someone with these symptoms may be suffering with in your organisation, is a good start to looking after your staff and improving your business.

Having this information will give you a better understanding of how to start the conversation surrounding their mental health, and to ensure you are promoting an open culture around mental health while taking active steps to tackling it.

Set an action plan using wellness measures

For any business, those active steps often come in the form of a Wellness Action Plan. 

A Wellness Action Plan is a personalised tool that everyone in your organisation can use – whether they have a mental health problem or not – to help identify what keeps them well at work, what causes them to become unwell and what support they would like to receive to boost wellbeing and ensure a successful recovery.

Implementing a successful Wellness Action Plan will go a long way to managing the long-term mental health and wellbeing of your staff. 

If you would like to find out more about how to build a Wellness Action Plan for your business, you can do so on our blog: Your guide to Wellness Action Plans. 

Calculate wellness ROI

Looking out for the signs and symptoms of mental health, and creating a wellness action plan for your business, will go a long way in creating a positive working environment for your staff. 

Implementing a wellbeing programme may also have an impact on the wellbeing of your staff and the bottom line of your business. But how do you actually know?

Calculating the ROI of wellness programmes is something that businesses often struggle to do, and many businesses never actually find out what difference they make. 

For your business to be successful, it is only right for your to ensure that every investment is yielding positive results and profit. You have to create a system where you can track your investments and see the impact they have on your business – and this includes your wellbeing programmes.

Let’s say, for a mental health & wellbeing program to be considered as successful, you must look at the numbers of the elements involved in your mental health & wellbeing programs such as absenteeism rate, presenteeism rate (productivity at work), reasons for absence, amongst a large set of other HR analytical data (if you would like to read more about HR analytics, and what can be tracked, you can read more on our blog – What is ‘HR Analytics’?). 

If you are not already tracking the ROI of your mental health & wellbeing programmes, then you are potentially missing a massive opportunity and may even be spending in the wrong areas. 

You can start to calculate the ROI of your wellbeing programmes with our free mental health and wellbeing calculator.