October 03, 2024

Introduction

In the face of surging health care costs and increasing employee health care needs in the U.S. and around the world, workforce well-being strategies aimed at helping employees get well, stay well and thrive are more important than ever. Well-being strategies, which include a multitude of offerings that seek to prevent disease, identify and reduce health risks, promote behavior change and serve as a complement to clinical services, can be a vital tool in supporting care across the disease continuum and defraying medical and pharmacy costs, especially for the most prevalent and costly conditions.

Beyond helping employees achieve health-related goals, employer well-being strategies also include initiatives geared toward helping employees flourish—experiencing and evaluating their home and work lives positively. Such initiatives can be supportive of business success: a recent study of more than 1,700 publicly listed companies in the U.S., found that worker well-being, as defined by self-reported measures of job satisfaction, purpose, happiness and stress, is associated with firm profitability and value.¹  The researchers also found that an investment portfolio of companies with high levels of workplace well-being outperforms standard benchmarks in the stock market.¹  Indeed, almost all employers understand the role well-being can play in business performance: 98% agree that well-being is a part of their workforce strategy (a company’s plan to ensure employees are able to meet business objectives) and multinational organizations report that the top objectives of their well-being strategies extend beyond reducing health risks and managing costs to include things like improving employee engagement.² To realize the value proposition of well-being strategies, employers and their partners must take a sustained multi-dimensional approach to employee well-being. While economic uncertainty and high health care costs may create an instinct to pull back from these initiatives, research on the business case for well-being directs employers to maintain their commitment in pursuit of better health, lower costs and achieving business objectives.

The Value of a Multi-dimensional Well-being Strategy

Workforce well-being, which can be described as the way employees feel, function and judge their lives, is impacted by many things including genetics, physical, mental, financial and social health, job satisfaction and the attributes of the communities in which employees live.³  Importantly, these factors are closely intertwined; they influence one another, as well as work together to foster overall well-being. For example, research from Gallup found that among individuals thriving in just one element of well-being (e.g., physical health), 53% were thriving overall, 28% were diagnosed with depression, 31% experienced burnout, and the disease burden cost per person was $5,225. In comparison, among people thriving in three elements of well-being, 86% were thriving overall, 13% were diagnosed with depression,15% experienced burnout and the disease burden cost per person of $4,558.⁴  Thus, employer strategies may be most successful when benefits, programs and policies address more than one area of well-being, and in fact, nearly all employers’ well-being strategies are multi-dimensional and include mental and physical health and financial well-being.²

Importantly, research on the bi-directional relationship between physical health and overall well-being provides a strong rationale for taking a multidimensional approach rather than a more singular one. Serious health problems, especially those that cause pain and interfere with daily functioning, hinder well-being. But perhaps more compelling is that people with high overall well-being are healthier, recover more quickly from a diverse set of health problems, deal better with pain, and live longer than people with low well-being.^6,7

Prioritizing Well-being in a Cost-Conscious Climate

Doubling down on well-being is one lever that employers can pull to address the increased prevalence of conditions contributing to rising health care costs globally. At the same time, increased visibility and expectations of health and well-being initiatives among leaders, in addition to increased involvement of Finance in the health and well-being strategy, will require employers to take several steps to maintain their commitment to well-being as they try to do more with less:

• Prioritize the aspects of well-being that necessitate the greatest investment. This will require employers to take a data-driven approach to determine how employees are faring in the various areas of well-being and the relationship between the different dimensions (e.g., mental and financial health). Employers should couple this information with business objectives and their budget to determine which dimensions necessitate the greatest financial resources.
• Assess the effectiveness of current benefits and programs across well-being dimensions. As with the exercise above, employers must use data to determine how the various programs and benefits are performing from a clinical, experience and/or financial standpoint. In doing this, employers will likely need to make difficult choices about the discontinuation of offerings that are undervalued or underperforming.
• Lean into organizational culture as enablers of physical, mental, financial and social health and job satisfaction. Benefits and programs alone are insufficient to effectively improve employee well-being. Employers should look to workplace policies, practices and norms, along with senior leadership and manager behavior and communication – which can influence health and well-being (and health and well-being engagement) – as a means of creating a thriving workforce and protecting the company investment in health and well-being benefits and programs. Using culture as a strategic tool also enables employers to focus on all areas of well-being, and not just those associated with a specific benefit or program investment. To effectuate culture change, employers will need to secure leadership buy-in and company-wide engagement and continuously coordinate and assess efforts across the organization.
• Make the link between well-being and organizational goals. Leaders may require a reiteration of the value of well-being and employers will need to tell a story using data. Ideas include demonstrating the symbiotic nature of employee health and well-being to showcase the fact that investments in health and well-being are not just integral, but interdependent components of a company’s strategy that work most successfully together. Employers may also want to highlight how well-being supports other organizational health-related goals, such as by showing its role in achieving health equity or putting the company on a path toward a globally consistent strategy. Additionally, employers should think beyond health and draw on data to illustrate the part that well-being plays in the larger human performance puzzle.

The Path Forward

With U.S. health care costs growing at rates of nearly 8%, and global medical costs posing similar challenges, employers cannot afford to take their foot off the gas of their well-being strategies. Supporting employee well-being can not only improve employee health, but also productivity, performance and even firm profitability and value. Economic realities may mean that well-being strategies take a different shape than in year’s past, as employers prioritize investments in specific dimensions (e.g., mental, physical and financial) and carefully consider the continuation of programs and benefits based on performance. Efforts to embed well-being into the company culture will become paramount as a means of affirming company commitment to employees, protecting investments in benefits and programs, setting employees up to thrive.

*Employee well-being was measured using a survey that asked about six subdomains of well-being: life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behaviors, work environment and basic access to resources needed to be safe and healthy.

Related Resources

• 2025 Employer Health Care Strategy Survey
• 15th Annual Employer-Sponsored Health and Well-being Survey
• Employer Trends Across Six Dimensions of Well-being
• Engineering Mental Health: Building a Strategy from the Ground Up
• Harnessing the Power of Managers in Your Well-being Strategy
• Social Connectedness: Building Bonds in the Workplace
• Food as Medicine: Nutrition Interventions for a Healthier Workforce Employer Guide to Health Equity
• Social Determinants: Acting to Achieve Well-being for All

More Topics

Resource Cost Management Job Satisfaction Mental and Emotional Well-being