Evaluating the costs and benefits of workplace wellbeing initiatives

There is an extensive academic and practitioner literature on what sorts of workplace wellbeing interventions work and for which types of workers (see Daniels et al, 2017; Watson et al, 2018; Whitmore et al, 2018). However, few of these studies include an assessment of the costs of the interventions nor do they provide an approach for evaluating these against the benefits in terms of any improvements in employee wellbeing. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the use of a wellbeing cost effectiveness analysis to evaluate workplace interventions and illustrates the technique using four case study examples of workplace interventions. We explore ways in which costs of interventions might be calculated, how the wellbeing and productivity benefits of interventions might be measured and finally, how the cost effectiveness of the interventions might be assessed.