Many wellbeing and HR leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to navigate the complex world of wellbeing intervention, and when it comes to trying to get the wellbeing budget that you need to answer all your issues at work, it can overlay yet more complexity.

In this blog I will provide you with top tips on and insights into how you can get more wellbeing investment into your organisation by leveraging various budgets with an emphasis on getting value for money.

Before going any further, I would heartily recommend the benefit of joining networks like ‘Let’s Improve Workplace Wellbeing’ where you will hear about best practice and access advice from your peers who have been through this process before.

A quick introduction…

As well as signposting to some excellent wellbeing providers, I’ll also use Cari, our neuroscience-based, AI workplace wellbeing platform, as an example to highlight the key ways in which you can utilise your budgets to incorporate solutions and interventions into your wellbeing strategy.

To set the scene, Cari can be:

  • A full, proactive and defensible EAP
  • An uplift to your current EAP or
  • Stitched into your current inhouse wellbeing investments.

Cari provides confidential, online wellbeing consultations, personalised support plans and connection to ‘humans to help’, as well as a real-time organisational data dashboard and reporting.

Choose a provider that can be on hand to support not only with tech, but also with engagement, like Champion Health. As well as technical support, Cari, also provides unlimited strategic consultancy, engagement support and an allocated coach. The support elements are important considerations in determining value for money.

If you have taken your time to assess the genuine needs of your organisation through wellbeing surveys – or better yet, by using the Search and Rescue value of Cari to establish real-time needs – and have completed a ‘stock take’ of what you already have in place – try and find a provider that will support you to fill in any specific gaps; like Hello Self or Thrive: Mental Wellbeing for access to therapists for your staff who are unwell.

So where do I get the Wellbeing Budget from?

There are a number of different places from which you can allocate budget. For example, with Cari, because the platform is made up of different attributes, we are able to separate these out so that they can fall into different budget areas:

Wellbeing Budget

This is the obvious place to start – but for many organisations the budget is still in its formative stages and therefore it may be a little on the light side.

If you have already committed to interventions, it may be that finding the entire funding from this budget is a challenge.

Therefore you can divide your purchase into discrete units that fit into other categories.

Employee Survey – Engagement Survey and/or wellbeing survey and/or staff opinion survey

It has become a ‘given’ that organisations should carry out surveys.

The problem with this is that many people are somewhat tired of being asked what they think, only to feel ignored while they await the results (often months later when it’s all got a little old).

On the other hand, there is budget for these products, and this may be a place where you can leverage some funding for your wellbeing initiative.

For example, Cari provides direct feedback to each individual on their own wellbeing level (see employee employee benefit angle below too), but also on team wellbeing, with an opportunity to vote on what changes they want to see happen.

This means Cari short circuits the usual laborious analysis and feedback and cuts to the chase – saving you money and time and making your people happy to be heard!

I know many people think that creating their own survey is a cost saver, but I would urge against it. If you are looking for an engagement survey I would recommend Martin Reddington’s TED survey – unique and extremely powerful, gaining excellent engagement rates.   Find Martin on LinkedIn and visit his website.

Years of evidence -based research and development cannot be achieved in a lunchtime; the better the data, the better you can respond and make a real difference.

L&D Budget

If you are providing growth opportunities from your wellbeing initiative, then your L&D budget may have a little wriggle room. Organisations such as Innerfit and Employees Health work in a bespoke way to upskill and train your staff fit for the needs you may have and budget for training can be accessed through L&D or through professional development budgets.

With Cari, we are able to break the coaching element down, so that it can be slotted into L&D, and we can provide feedback to demonstrate learning from the use of the service.

This is because we are able to target people according to job roles, position, full or part time etc. We can demonstrate real value for money with a targeted intervention.

Our service includes, not just coaching, but group coaching and workshops (definitely learning), and Cari itself has some learning resources included, including leadership development – so again, you can be creative in accessing funding.

Employee Benefit’s Budget

Is wellbeing an employee benefit?

Well, in my opinion it is a right, but for many years this has given EAPs a throne upon which to sit, with it being very difficult to dislodge them – after all, who wants to be the one ‘takes away’ an employee benefit!

However, it is worth exploring how you make the best use of this budget – Cari could be an uplift to your existing EAP, for example.

Cari provides immediate support and can be linked into your EAP, you can use your employee benefits budget to fund the Cari uplift.

We can provide a full EAP service with Cari resources, as well as Cari coaching for people in need – note that with this service you can achieve a much higher level of employee engagement in the service, delivering more one to one support than a standard EAP.

Procurement – nightmares!

One of the biggest problems can be getting through the procurement rules and procedures.

Make sure your provider will handhold you through the process, and if they are a tech firm, that they have Cyber Essentials in place to help with all the Cyber issues you will need to resolve before starting.

Your provider should be able to furnish you with a clear, step by step process, and they ought to do all the heavy lifting on this – because this is where the Information Governance Team, IT, and HR all have a hand in it – and it can be a bit confusing for everyone.

If there is truly no other product like yours on the market, and your client identifies it as the most effective and urgent solution you can use a waiver to the usual procurement rules. A waiver can only be authorised and applied if your supplier can prove that their product is genuinely unique and effective – and importantly, if you can show that you have no other option to achieve your aims, and that you have an urgency that will not allow you to wait for a long procurement process. If the Waiver is accepted, you can get your product purchased and start using it very quickly, without putting it out to bid or tender. Clearly, this must be approached judiciously, as it may involve …

How you can bring down the price of a wellbeing solution?

As part of the Movement for Wellbeing we aim to reward those who take wellbeing at work seriously – so we provide a reducing fee if your wellbeing is robust! So, all your good work can lead to a direct financial benefit, as well as all the other benefits you will achieve both directly and indirectly.

An important element of the Wellbeing Movement is to make measuring wellbeing mandatory – say at least 2 x a year. For this we also provide a discount – so the higher the engagement – the lower the price.

These are our ideas and suggestions on how to get investment in wellbeing, creatively. I hope they have been useful for creating your wellbeing budget.

I’m very interested to hear other people’s inventive ways of getting more wellbeing into the organisation by leveraging budgets – and whether you have seen an ROI from this, be it intuitively or in numbers – I’d love to hear more.

So please leave a comment below and do connect/message me on LinkedIn.

If you’d like to have a chat about how Cari works and could help you, please do get in touch with us.