Most boards have never seen this number.
An assessment of what poor wellbeing is costing you, written so your finance director can check every figure in it.
"Absence is running at 2.6%, broadly in line with sector."
Accurate, benchmarked, and the only part of the cost with its own line item.
"Roughly three times that, once cover, presenteeism and management time are counted."
None of which arrives labelled, so none of it gets managed.
You are already paying for this. You are just not seeing the invoice.
Absence has a line item, so it gets attention. The larger costs do not. Someone covers the work, badly, at a higher grade than the job needs. People come in unwell and produce a fraction of their normal output while looking present. Managers spend their week absorbing the gap instead of doing the job you promoted them into.
Then a senior person leaves, and you pay recruitment fees, a notice period of reduced output, and six months of someone learning what the last person knew. That cost lands in a different budget from the cause, which is why the two are almost never connected.
An assessment connects them. Not with a benchmark borrowed from a published study, but with your absence data, your salary bands and your turnover, so the number is yours and you can defend it.
What the work involves
From £8,000, fixed before we start
- 01
Your data, not a benchmark
Absence, turnover, headcount and salary bands. Where a figure is missing I say so in the report rather than substituting an average and hoping.
- 02
Private conversations
A cross-section of people, unattributed. This is where the reasons live. Surveys get you the sanctioned answer.
- 03
Pressure mapping
Which roles and layers are carrying the load, and where a single departure would hurt most. Key person risk is a governance question, not an HR one.
- 04
A board paper
Costed, sourced, and ordered by what you can actually move. Including the items where my honest answer is that the return does not justify the spend.
I will tell you which of it is not worth doing.
Most wellbeing spend is decided by what is easy to buy. An app, a webinar, a week in May with posters. It is measurable, it is cheap, and it changes almost nothing, because the thing making people unwell is usually the workload, the manager or the uncertainty.
An assessment that came back recommending everything would be worthless. The value is in the ranking, and in being told plainly which line to cut.
Questions people ask before they call
- How is this different from an engagement survey?
- A survey tells you how people say they feel. This tells you what that is costing, in money, and which parts of it you can move. Surveys are also answered by people who know their manager will read the summary. I talk to individuals privately and the aggregate is what reaches you.
- I have been quoted a fraction of this for a wellbeing audit. Why?
- Because it is a different product and you should know that before you choose. A wellbeing audit reviews your policies, runs a staff survey and returns recommendations, and around £1,500 is a fair market price for one. This starts at the board end: interviews at executive level, your absence and turnover data costed into a figure your finance director can defend, key person risk written down, and a paper your board can act on. If what you need is the policy review, buy the policy review. I will tell you if that is the honest answer.
- Will my finance director accept the numbers?
- That is the test I write to. Every figure carries its source and its assumption, and where a number is an estimate it says so and shows the range. A board paper that cannot survive one sceptical question is worse than no paper.
- What do you actually need from us?
- Absence and turnover data, a headcount and salary band picture, and access to a cross-section of people for private conversations. If you have run a survey recently I will read it rather than repeat it.
- Do people find out what their colleagues said?
- No. Individual conversations are not attributed. If a group is small enough that a quote would identify someone, it does not go in the report.
- How long does it take?
- Scope decides it, and we fix the scope in writing before anything starts. You are agreeing to a defined piece of work with an end date, not opening a day rate that runs until someone stops it.
- What does it cost?
- Assessments start at £8,000. Where yours lands depends on headcount, how many sites are involved and how many conversations the picture needs. You get a fixed figure before the work begins. I publish the floor because a finance director cannot put an unpriced item on an agenda, and most of this market makes you book a call to find out.
Start with the rough number.
Run your own figures first. If the result is large enough to be worth an hour of your time, we should talk about where it is actually coming from.