With tackling ill health and economic inactivity firmly in the government’s sights in 2025, occupational health and wellbeing are set to become even more central to the larger, social role of organisations, writes Karl Bennett.
This will be the year when HR feels the impact of the government’s Get Britain Working white paper, especially when it comes to reintegrating people who have been on long-term sick leave, often dealing with issues around mental health.
It is clear from the white paper that there is a new determination to deal with the rising proportion of economically inactive people in the UK.
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This includes getting more young people, people with disabilities, and those with long-term health conditions back into workplaces, which means a bunch of policy innovations and projects is coming.
Get Britain Working has a target of an 80% employment rate, and an initial £240m to push for change. There are now 2.8 million people of working age who are off work with a long-term sickness. In 2023, 53% of these pointed to problems with mental health as the main reason – a 40% increase from 2019.
We’ve already seen the willingness of the new government to be creative and controversial when it comes to employee health.
Not only the funding for making weight-loss jabs available to the unemployed but its plans for sending ‘job coaches’ into hospitals to help support mental health patients think about getting back to work, looking at CVs and applications and coping with interviews.
The planned ‘connect to work’ scheme, as another example, will offer voluntary employment opportunities to people with disabilities, health conditions or other complex barriers to being in work, eventually supporting up to 100,000 people a year.
Pressure to address long-term sickness
Occupational health needs to be open about what’s being done to maximise the positive, to ensure a ‘good work’ culture, while addressing the potential for insidious harms.”
What’s next? The IPPR think-tank has already called for employers to be fined for not providing a ‘healthy’ work environment. With workplace health becoming more centre-stage there is going to be more pressure on employers and HR to be addressing the causes of long-term sickness, especially understanding the impact that workplaces have on health, and on mental health in particular. Being a ‘good’ employer has taken on a new meaning.
Occupational health professionals need to be prepared for this heightening of attention, when wellbeing strategies will take on a new level of significance.
The world of work has to find the best balance between offering challenge, effort and risk on one side and feelings of fulfilment and safety on the other. For the moment, the balance isn’t always there, and neither employers nor individual employees with a history of poor mental health are likely to gain from being pushed back together.
The starting point has to be the belief that work is good for people. Besides the financial rewards, work comes with a sense of purpose, challenges, fulfilment, and the chance to belong to a community of like-minded colleagues with some shared goals. In other words, employers play a positive role in society.
Part of that role means being clear-eyed and serious about how work environments can have a negative effect on physical and mental health, through excessive levels of stress, toxic cultures, unreasonable levels of pressure, a feeling of work life being out of control.
Supporting mental health
Occupational health needs to be open about what’s being done to maximise the positive, to ensure a ‘good work’ culture, while addressing the potential for insidious harms. This is especially when workplaces will be expected to accommodate and reintegrate people with mental health issues, whose triggers may have included experiences at work.
Supporting mental health, of course, isn’t just something that comes with making ‘reasonable adjustments’. There has to be trust and a sense of psychological safety among people often dealing with difficult and complex combinations of issues around health and finances and relationships.
The new focus on workplace health in policy and society more generally means employers will have to demonstrate a detailed understanding of organisational health.
The era when health and wellbeing services could be offered simply as a perk for employees is over.”
How do their people and their workplace processes and culture interact? What are the risks in terms of stresses and pressure points? And how can these situations be better managed?
In other words, it needs to be about anticipating and minimising unnecessary sources of stress.
That means looking more closely at the mechanics of workplace wellbeing: levels of absence, but also trends in types of absence, among which groups. What role do managers play, and when and how, in particular areas, certain styles and kinds of performance demands? What are the most common and significant causes of stress and anxiety among different teams?
There has to be more use, and better, use of the available data for management reporting and the constant evolution of wellbeing planning and services. Employee assistance programmes are an important source of insights into staff concerns, a means of tracking changes in demand for support, and expert interpretation of what’s happening and what a response should be.
This data can be used as evidence for investment into particular awareness campaigns around issues. For example, managing stress, financial wellbeing, menopause or support for carers. It can also be used for management development and mental health services and schemes (such as more access to counselling, EAP availability for other members of family groups).
Ultimately, the era when health and wellbeing services could be offered simply as a perk for employees is over.
With negative cycles of work and ill health and economic inactivity in the spotlight, OH and wellbeing have become central to the larger, social role of organisations – to the reputation and status of employers.
A serious-minded and proactive approach in 2025 will be essential.
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