According to Edenred’s 2015 Wellbeing Barometer, only 21% of companies believe they’ve got the right wellbeing policies in place.

It’s great to see 81% of those HR decision makers who responded to the survey indicating that their business invest in a wellbeing initiative, however 60% haven’t yet taken any steps to understand which wellbeing issues are important within their own operation.

Andy Philpott, Sales and Marketing Director at Edenred commented that there is a huge gap between the support HR professionals recognise is important to wellbeing within their organisation and the level of wellbeing that’s available to the team.

He went on to say: “It is clear that many organisations are currently paying lip service to the idea of employee health and wellbeing by failing to take steps to understand the issues facing their employees and organisation.”

97% of HR practitioners surveyed indicated that they believe there is a link between the performance of the business and wellbeing initiatives, with 67% going as far as saying HR policy is crucial to the wellbeing of a business.

Philpott went on to say: “Without a strategic approach to wellbeing, backed by investment in the right areas, the majority of organisations will fail to make any real difference to employee health through their current approaches.”

Additional research from AXA suggests that 68% of SME management are concerned that output would be impacted if members of the organisation’s team couldn’t attend work for more than four weeks but have no proper absence management solutions for employees who are off due to illness.

AXA PPP Healthcare SME director Glen Parkinson said: “Busy SME owners need to think about developing a system for managing employee absence to help mitigate unexpected costs, such as recruiting temporary cover and potential business losses due to the loss of a skilled worker.”

A properly thought through wellbeing policy coupled with thorough absence management strategy (of which absence management software is just one element) is clearly seen as an important combination by the HR community through which increased efficiencies and the minimisation of absenteeism and lateness can be achieved, however more of a business case needs to be made for adoption to take place. Inevitably this will fall to HR management.