How to make a compelling business case for wellbeing at work

Just a few minutes of additional productivity each day per employee adds up to significant savings over time. 

But if you asked your budget holder what it would mean for the business if employees enjoyed an extra 5 stress-free minutes to be productive each day, what do you think they would say?

It’s a question they’ve probably never considered before. But all you’ll need to do to get the budget is show them the numbers.

Let’s take a look at an example…

Putting a price on wellbeing – the maths of wellbeing at work ROI

Let’s say your team members make the UK average annual salary of £30,000.

Assuming they work 240 days per year and 8 hours per day, 5 minutes of an employee’s time costs your organisation £1.30. If you’re able to shift 5 minutes of someone’s time from struggling with wellbeing to doing something productive, that’s the cost-saving you make.

That recaptured productivity for one employee is worth:

• £9.10 over a week
• £39.00 over a month
• £468.00 over a year

Now imagine you’re running a wellbeing workshop for ten people – you can add a zero to all of those figures:

• £91.00 over a week
• £390.00 over a month
• £4,680.00 over a year

Compare these numbers to what it might cost you to arrange a wellbeing workshop and it’s not hard to see the significant ROI to be gained.

The four numbers you need to build your business case for wellbeing at work training

Now you understand the underlying rationale, let’s prepare those four simple numbers and get ready for some serious analysis.

 

 To create your business case, you need to know:

1. The duration of the workshop
2. The fee for the workshop
3. The number of participants
4. A rough average salary estimate for the participants

Depending on your business, that might look like this:

1. The duration of the workshop: 2 hours
2. The fee for the workshop: £695
3. The number of participants: 30
4. A rough average salary estimate for the participants: £30,000

Now we’ve got those numbers, let’s get into the clever bit. In the next three steps, we’ll use these figures to calculate an ROI analysis for a wellbeing workshop.

1) How to calculate the true cost of a wellbeing workshop

I find it’s usually best to get the painful stuff out of the way first. So let’s start by considering costs.

We’ll score extra brownie points with the budget-holder by including the workshop fee, and the value of the time the participants give up to take part in the workshop.

To calculate this figure, we’ll use our annual salary estimate to calculate this:

£30,000 ÷ 240 days ÷ 8 hours = an hourly wage cost of £15.63

£15.63 hourly wage cost x 2 hour workshop duration x 30 participants = time cost of £937.50

£937.50 time cost + £695 workshop fee = Total investment of £1,632.50

But what about opportunity cost?

In a profitable business, the productive output of an employee is of course worth more than their wage cost. Therefore, doesn’t this analysis underestimate the opportunity cost of the time spent in the workshop? The answer is yes! 

But don’t worry – as we move onto the benefits side of our analysis, we’ll also be underestimating the value of the productive time that’s saved by the same amount. As the underlying basis of our analysis is time, the relationship between the figures is exactly the same whether you’re valuing it using the wage cost or opportunity cost. 

And it’s a lot more convenient to just plug in a wage figure rather than trying to quantify opportunity costs.

2) How to find the break even point for your investment in team wellbeing

The big question now is how much productive time does our investment need to save us for it to make economic sense? Let’s run the numbers:

Earlier we calculated our hourly wage cost per employee as £15.63. Now we need to find the wage cost per minute:

£15.63 ÷ 60 = a £0.26 wage cost per minute per employee.

So what’s a minute of productivity worth across a full group of participants:

£0.26 wage cost per minute x 30 participants = a £7.80 wage cost per minute for the full group of participants

If we divide our total investment (above) by this figure, we’ll find out how many minutes of productivity we need to save to recoup the time and money we invest in the training.

Total investment of £1,632.50 ÷ £7.80 wage cost per minute for the group of participants = 209 minutes of productivity that needs to be saved to break even.

That’s 209 minutes over an entire year. .

Things just got really interesting for your budget holder…

But we’re not done yet, what do those 209 minutes mean when we look at people’s daily or weekly routines?

If we divide 209 minutes by the 240 work days across a typical year, the figure you arrive at is just 53 seconds.

That means if participants take enough away from the techniques, tools and tips covered in the workshop to reallocate 53 seconds of their work day from struggling to productivity, you’re in the money. 

In other words: