What role does wellbeing have in performance at work?
It’s a bit of a leading title, we know, but it’s not always as easy to unpick and analyse the what the answers mean when trying to promote a wellbeing or wellness product into the market.
We undoubtedly have a fast growing wellness market, but is there an equally growing understanding of who buys wellness or wellbeing, particularly in the B2B market?
Wellbeing or wellness of individuals, organisations and even whole nations has become a fast growing sector. McKinsey estimated the global wellness market at $1.5 trillion in 2012 with an annual growth rate of between 5-10%.
With a growing desire for all of us to get more from our personal lives as well as our working lives, this market is unlikely to slow down in the near future. It’s a market with high demand for answers and a slowly growing pool of recognised solution providers.
The majority of the widely recognised providers are those with a direct to consumer product such as mindfulness and meditation apps, such as Calm and Headspace and now a few broader services offer solutions, such as BetterUp.
However, having worked in the market for various clients and having conducted our own desk research, there remains a need for a greater understanding of who the customer is, their needs and how they are seeking help.
Some market background - The blurred line of organisational vs individual responsibility for wellness
If we focus on the business to business market briefly, and by association the B2B2C market. The world of work has changed irrevocably since the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, but the writing was on the wall before the pandemic started. With more of us working in hybrid conditions, our work life balance has never before been so unbalanced or hard to establish where one finishes and the other starts.
With this evolution, the line between individual responsibility to ensure personal wellness and the role the organisations that we work for play in this pursuit of wellness, gets more blurred by the day.
Organisational investment in wellness is increasing, as the awareness of the financial impact of reduced wellbeing of employees on performance, grows.
But, as with any market in a rapid growth phase, there is a lot of uncertainty from both solution providers and solution seekers on needs and service delivery. Various questions could be asked from “how do I reduce my stress levels” or “how do help my team communicate better”, through to the more obscure “what role does nature have in my performance at work”. All of these questions are slowly being answered by new or existing providers within the growing sector.
We are going to focus on exploring the sector from the perspective of solution providing organisations and delve a little deeper into what answers they might be seeking as they try to establish themselves in the market.
Framing the market
To start this ball rolling we wanted to take a step back and think about the need state again. Just how do organisations seek improvements in wellbeing/wellness and what is motivating that, is it a shared sense of moral obligation, or do they in fact seek improvements in organisational performance (and potential financial performance) and wellness is the current favoured route to that?
What is wellness or wellbeing?
Let’s start with some opening clarity, before we get to the more complex matters. Wellness is a broad subject to say the least, it encompasses several areas, some of which still have negative connotations associated with them and are harder to assess, such as the equally broader area of our mental health. These harder to measure areas also include factors such as our levels of stress or anxiety, the quality of our relational skills etc. All of these factors are associated with each other and interrelated. Others factors that can have an impact are easier to measure and assess, such as physical health.
Some organisations have developed holistic frameworks to pull all of these elements together, using terms such as mental fitness, to allow them to encompass a broad service offer and provided measurement capability to allow organisations to report on performance improvements. The primary solution providers in this space offer personal or team coaching solutions.
Other solution or service providers focus on specific areas such as nutritional supplements, meditation, sleep apps or personal training apps. These are much more targeted in their objectives, but as their own markets grow and they look to expand their markets, they start to face the same challenges of the wider holistic providers.
Who buys wellness or wellbeing, or for that matter performance solutions at organisations?
With the growth of understanding and recognition of the importance of wellbeing or wellness at organisations in building resilience, retaining people, building shared values and culture, and ultimately ensuring that they remain profitable and are able to illustrate any return of investment in people programmes, the roles associated with these responsibilities have grown.
A broad range of titles and responsibilities are now present in many organisations, depending on scale, from more traditional roles such Chief People Officer (or Human Resources Director), Head of Learning and Development, through to roles such as Head of Wellbeing or Head of EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion).
These roles above are ultimately the stakeholders or budget holders that are likely to have budgetary responsibility for investment in programmes to improve the wellbeing or performance of people within an organisation, but they are not necessarily always driving the purchasing need or intent of wellbeing or wellness products. This need or intent also includes middle management, team leaders, department heads, the people who are often identifying the need before seeking a solution, then contacting the budget holders. This is without considering the individual market of those employees looking to improve their own personal performance and wellbeing at work (or in life generally) that may fall as a B2B or B2C market, depending on their own access to services with an employer, desire to make it happen or level of need.
Preventative or Reactive - which is driving the corporate wellbeing market?
We’d love to say that the majority of products and services in this sector are preventative. Alas, it’s still always easier to find the budget to fix a problem that is apparent, than it is to prevent a problem that is yet to happen. Despite the evidence to support preventative action.
However, the data to support the benefits of addressing issues that can occur in a workforce without support in place to improve wellbeing are hard to ignore and growing. The total number of working days lost due to work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2021/22 was 17 million days in the UK*. This equated to an average of 18.6 days lost per case.
The data detail on what sectors this impact of stress is most prevalent is clear, with the professional sectors clearly at the front.
Estimated prevalence rates for self-reported stress, depression or anxiety in Great Britain, for people working in the last 12 months by occupation, 2017/18-2019/20. Source Labour Force Survey UK. 95% confidence levels illustrated on diagram.
In terms of how much of this stress we can effect through proactive programmes, the evidence seems clear also. With factors such as interpersonal relationships, managing change and personal development making up over 40% of causes*.
Percentage of work-related mental ill health case reported to THOR-GP according to the main precipitating event, three year aggregate total - 2013-2015. THOR-GP is a surveillance scheme in which general practitioners (GPs)in the UK are asked to report new cases of work-related ill health.
This presents a real opportunity for employers to address proactively and gain some space from their competitors in their market. Those days off with stress add up for any organisation to cover, a proactive programme to address these issues could soon show good ROI.
However, the challenge still remains for providers of these services to communicate the benefit of proactive and preventative solutions to their customers in a clear and tangible manner, to allow the buyers to present their case to budget holders and gain the investment they need. It’s complex ask, often with justifiable need for measurement solutions to allow organisations to benchmark performance against investment to evidence benefits.
How do people buy solutions to these wellbeing issues in the workplace?
Here lies the big question that people like ourselves are looking to answer and it feels the only way to find out, is to ask.
Are those in roles that hold a responsibility to maintain workforces looking for solutions that improve performance or are they looking for solutions that improve wellbeing, and that in turn improves performance?
We can hazard guesses with some data from the likes of Google Trends (that allows us to look at search volume on search terms), but none of it is clearer enough to form a strategy around and founded on a broad reaching search audience, rather than that niche audience that we believe we might be targeting. With the right search terms we should narrow the audience, but that’s still a little finger in the air, in terms of definitive insight.
The above search analysis is over the last 12 months, with the UK as its focus. For reference, the terms searched for are:
Workforce performance
Corporate wellness
Corporate wellbeing
Wellness coach
Work performance coach
In terms of volume, “wellness coach” comes out clearly in the lead, but corporate wellbeing and corporate wellness are doing okay. We’d expect a term that can be searched as an individual solution to come out on top in terms of volume (there are more individuals out there searching than there are organisations). Other than that, it’s interesting to see “wellbeing” holding its own against a similar search phrase that replaces “wellbeing” for “wellness”., but we’ll come back to this.
If we tweak the above search to remove the zero volume term “work performance coach” and replace it with “wellbeing coach” the result is significant.
In the UK, “wellbeing coach” has almost twice the volume of “wellness coach”. A search trend that we’ll find isn’t global. But we’re unable to identify how many of these searches are performed by individuals over searches provided by department heads or people managers.
If we switch the market to a US market audience, it changes.
Here, “wellness” far outstrips “wellbeing” as a search term both with “coach”, a similar pattern with “corporate” replacing “coach”.
If we switch audiences again from the US, this time to a global audience…
We can see that “wellness” remains clearly in the lead in terms of volume over “wellbeing”, but “wellbeing” undoubtedly has volume on a global scale of great significance in the US.
The Google Trend charts provide some very high level insight into the market of wellness, nothing I’d pin our strategic advice on, other than perhaps using “wellness” over “wellbeing” in the US market, but even this would want to be qualified further.
We could tweak the above terms all day and gain some marginal gain in insight, but it’s only skimming the surface of knowledge in this area.
Other online tools (Ahrefs in particular we’ve found helpful with content strategy) can help us to get a clearer view of intention, buying trends and needs of potential prospects in the wellbeing/wellness and performance markets in the workplace.
But we genuinely feel the only way to truly unpick this market and buying intentions would be through in-depth interviews and qualitative focus groups with some carefully recruited cohorts. Particularly when informed and directed by the work that online tools can initially provide to help shape the strategy of the research.
Insight is invaluable when developing services and products in a competitive, fast growing market
Gaining insight into matters such as the above through good research can be invaluable and is essential when trying to grow in a competitive market.
This particularly the case when the market growth is powered by an increasing sociological change around workforce culture and is currently under supplied by services designed to meet that demand, as it feels in the case of employee wellness.
So what’s the barrier to more start-ups doing more research? Some of it might be down to lack of knowledge of how to approach the research market, the other is likely to be available funds, with other work streams taking priority on budget demands. But there’s somethings that any of us can do to start gaining insights to help shape their customer profiles and needs..
Simple steps to take in gain insight in the wellness and wellbeing market place
Simple steps can be taken by anyone operating in the space to gradually grow insight from what they have to hand.
Starting with your existing clients. Whilst no one wants to rock a new client onboarding, clients will also want to see that you’re strategic enough to be able to make the right steps to ensure your service design is continually evolving to meet their evolving needs. Consider introducing processes such as:
Client onboarding survey - a quick survey with any new client that establishes how they found you, what they were looking for, why they choose you and what the onboarding process was like. This could be part of the sign-up process if you’re an online or app based solution.
6 month client review survey - how are they finding the service they are getting from you, what improvements they have seen, what new challenges are they facing you might be able to help with.
Post project/programme survey - what worked, what didn't, what improvements have been seen in participants. Create a project wrap-up template for all project managers to use to provide some extra value to both your customer and to yourself for future product/service development.
Then for a broader audience and prospects view, create value exchanges to build your community and illustrate thought leadership through a series of tasks that are likely to be driven by your marketing team.
Content strategy - try creating content pillars around keyword areas such as wellbeing vs wellness and track their performance against each other in your intended audiences. Using tools such Ahrefs can really help here. Create core content themes that then dive deeper into more granular aspects of your pillar content, that allows you to find sweets spots for engagement and service changes.
Social feedback - use your social channels to explore your audience preferences, run polls to gather insights around purchasing behaviour. Make sure you’re able to access all the audience profiling tools for your social channels so you can analyse performance of content properly.
Live debates - run live discussion where you can invite an existing client in a buying position to discuss the challenges the sector faces with colleagues in similar positions at other organisations. Ensure the discussions are beneficial for all as a strong value exchange for your existing client. Don’t be afraid to ask the questions they all want to know the answers to, everyone will appreciate frankness when trying to find the answer to complex issues.
These are just some of the ways you can gain valuable insight without investing in more formal research.
Gain richer, deeper, more effective insight through qualitative research
At the end of the day, the above techniques can all add to your growing knowledge of your audience and their buying behaviour and sector trends, but nothing can beat the rich insights gained through qualitative research.
Whether it’s in-depth interviews with incentivised recruitment of carefully selected participants or focus groups with clear props and good moderation to ensure actionable insights are collected, analysed and interpreted to provide clear direction on service or product development, or for that matter, brand strategy.
We’ve never run an insight session with a client when the outcome and response hasn’t been “wow, that has been so helpful for me to understand what my customers need and want”.
Speak to us today to see how we might help you grow your understanding of your wellness audience
Whether you’re a niche operator in the wellness and wellbeing market, or a broad reaching provider of mental fitness services and coaching, we can help. We’ve a good range of insight and strategically focussed products to help you identify and reach your customers better.
We also understand that as start-ups find their feet, having these skills within the core team, isn’t always a given. We can help fill that gap in an integrated manner whilst you grow, until you can justify bringing these skills in-house. Below are a selection of research products that can help, but we can also help put in place measurement and tracking tools, to ensure you gather the information you need to help deliver a better product or service.
Insight Ignition
Kick start your insight process with some desk research. If you’re startup finding your feet, or a few years into your development or looking to start some NPD use our insight ignition pack to fire that process up with some initial insights to build from > Insight ignition pack
Strategic Content Development
Content plays a big role in any market growth, it shapes the view that your audience have of you, it should answer the questions that your customers have when they search for solutions that you offer. Whatever you publish, it should have a strategy at its heart. We can help you get this rolling > Strategic content development
Focus Groups
We believe Focus Groups to be one of the most powerful insight tools for truly understanding customer needs, behaviour and intent. We can help you find your feet with these powerful insights and get you the insight that will take your service and products to the next level > Focus groups
Persona Workshops
Knowing who your customers are and what their needs are, needs documenting. Properly created persona profiles can help you to shape content with a clear view of who you hope is going to be reading it and what they’re looking for. We can start you off with persona development workshops or help improve what you already have > Persona workshops
We’re on your side
These are just some of the ways that we can help. We believe that most in the wellness market are fighting the good fight for the right reason, we’re here to help. We offer affordable solutions for people we identify as making a change for good, helping others to do better, be happier and achieve shared goals.
Simply get in touch with us today and see if we can help you. We’re always up for a chat.
References:
Is hybrid working here to stay - ONS - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/ishybridworkingheretostay/2022-05-23
Feeling good. The future of the 1.5 trillion wellness market - McKinsey https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/feeling-good-the-future-of-the-1-5-trillion-wellness-market
*Health and Safety Executive UK, Stress Data to March 2022 https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress.pdf