Is employee health an expense or a business priority?

Last year, UK workers lost 148.8 million working days to sickness or injury. [A] It’s a striking figure from the Office for National Statistics, but numbers like that can feel a long way from day-to-day business.

So, forget the national picture for a moment. Think about your own business.

Imagine one of your most experienced electricians is signed off work by their GP for six weeks. The work still has to be done. Someone else picks up the urgent jobs. Overtime gets approved. Programmes get reshuffled. Routine maintenance slips down the list, and quotations take a little longer because everyone’s focus is on keeping existing customers happy. Six weeks assumes nothing speeds that timeline up.

From the outside, the business looks like it’s coping. Hopefully, your customers never notice a thing.

Behind the scenes, it’s a different story. Management time disappears into replanning. Pressure builds across the team. Margins come under strain. The business misses new work because everyone is focused on delivering what's already been promised.

None of it gets traced back to the absence, yet it all has a cost.

That’s the real cost of poor employee health. Not just the salary paid while someone’s away, but everything that happens because they’re not there. And that’s where the thinking needs to change. Employee health has long been viewed by managers primarily as a wellbeing issue. But it’s a business issue too.

Looking beyond the obvious cost

Every business owner understands why some spending makes business sense. A new van. Better equipment. An extra employee. Business owners don't judge this spending simply on price. It’s judged on the business outcomes it could support: could it improve efficiency, create capacity, reduce costs, or help the business grow?

Employee health deserves the same level of business consideration. Not because it’s fashionable, and not because competitors are doing it, but because poor health already carries a cost. The real question is whether the potential to address that disruption is supported by a strong business case. That’s a genuinely different way of thinking about employee health.

The cost doesn’t end when someone goes off sick

One of the biggest challenges facing employers isn’t simply that people become ill. It’s everything that has to happen before they’re well again: getting seen, getting a diagnosis, starting treatment, and recovering. None of it happens as quickly as businesses hope.

According to NHS England, around 7.2 million referral-to-treatment pathways remain open. At the same time, more than 122,000 patients have waited over a year to begin treatment. [B] These figures aren’t a criticism of the NHS. They simply reflect how long that pathway, from getting seen to getting well, can take.

For businesses, delays to diagnosis or treatment extend the uncertainty. Employees may remain absent for longer or return on reduced duties, while projects continue. The knock-on effect grows with every additional week. Employers can’t control NHS waiting times. But they can decide whether to offer support that potentially gives employees faster access to diagnosis and treatment.

The question is simple: if there’s enough business benefit in addressing that disruption, what level of spend is commercially sensible? That’s a business question before it’s ever a product one.

Start with the problem, not the solution

Businesses identify problems before choosing solutions. The same principle applies to supporting employee health. Before anyone looks at what might fix it, it’s worth asking what absence, delay, and disruption are actually costing the business, and whether there is a strong business case for taking steps to address that disruption.

According to CIPD, 77% of organisations now link employee benefits to at least one strategic business objective. [C] That suggests many employers now ask what they want to achieve before deciding which benefits to offer.

A clear objective makes decisions around supporting employee health more focused.

Before committing any spend, four questions are worth asking:

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• What is that problem currently costing us?
• Which approach is most likely to improve outcomes?
• How will we know whether it has worked?

Straightforward questions, but they shift the whole approach.

A different way of thinking

None of this diminishes the importance of looking after people. Supporting employees has always mattered, and it always will. What needs to change is how employers think about employee health. Not simply as part of a benefits package, but as one of many spending decisions competing for the same budget.

That's a significant shift. When employers consider employee health alongside other business spending, the question changes. It’s no longer “can we afford to spend on employee health?” It becomes: can we afford not to understand what poor employee health is already costing the business?

Once that question is answered, businesses can weigh up which approach might help. Faster access to diagnosis and treatment, for example, can shorten the time an employee is away and reduce the uncertainty that follows. Like every other business decision, the right choice depends on the problem you’re trying to solve, and should be assessed against the business objectives it is intended to support, not simply on its cost.

Before deciding which employee health solution is the right choice for your business, ask a simpler question: what impact is poor employee health already having on your business?

References

[A] Office for National Statistics (2025). Sickness absence in the UK labour market: 2025.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/sicknessabsenceinthelabourmarket/2025

[B] NHS England. Referral to Treatment Waiting Times Statistics.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/rtt-waiting-times/

[C] Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2026). Reward Survey: Employee Benefits.
https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/2026-pdfs/9075-reward-survey-report-web-new.pdf