Most wellbeing programs waste money because they target the wrong problems or only part of them. Measure your spending against healthcare claims, retention, absenteeism, and productivity. If you can't show a return, you're just buying calm spaces that nobody uses.
The way we are spending dollars and as leaders, you're all spending lots of dollars on calm headspace, bringing in advisors, hiring chief well being officers, or even running programs for people to come speak. Those are not giving any returns to your friends. The reason they're not giving any returns is because we are focusing on the wrong problem or only part of the problem. So the reason this is really important is you should use this research to go ask the current wellbeing programs to show you the return. Just like you would ask for returns from any investment you approve for physical assets or for digital campaigns or for IT infrastructure, you should look and make sure that there is a fact base and there is a way for the returns to be measured. And there are three or four drivers you can look into. You can look at healthcare claims, you can look at retention, you can look at absenteeism, you can look at productivity. But make sure that your wellbeing dollars are actually giving you the return that you want. Otherwise we will not get the results from the first study.
Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret
