EXCLUSIVE: Only 10% of respondents do not currently offer any form of mental wellbeing education or support, according to research by Employee Benefits.
The Benefits research 2019, which surveyed 290 HR decision-makers and was published in May 2019, found that the number of organisations that do not offer mental wellbeing support has decreased, compared with 18% in 2018, and 16% in 2017; employee mental health evidently continues to rise in importance for employers.
In a similar pattern, a quarter (24%) of those surveyed do not currently offer financial wellbeing support, whereas 37% did not cater to the financial wellness of employees in 2018. Indeed, for each aspect of wellbeing, the proportion of respondents that do not provide support has decreased across the board since 2018.
Considering the increasing awareness of the links between financial, physical, social and mental health, it is perhaps no surprise to see that ever more organisations are taking a more holistic approach, and that all the elements of wellbeing support are on the rise.
Digital communication is building in popularity at pace; this is the most common method of delivering education and support relating to physical (33%), mental (32%), financial (31%), and social wellbeing (27%).
This might reflect that advancements in technology are making it easier to reach staff as and when they need help, via their mobile devices, or indeed be due to the increasingly remote and flexible working world.
For job satisfaction and career wellbeing, however, face-to-face contact is the preferred method (29%); it only has a small margin over digital content (25%), but the use of printed materials lags behind at 16% this year, showing no increase on 2018’s result.
In general, printed materials are either stagnating or decreasing as a method of promoting employee wellbeing interventions, dropping by nine percentage points for physical wellbeing, 13 for mental health and five for financial wellness since 2018.
Click to download Employee Benefits‘ Benefits research 2019