Businesses show lack of care for staff wellbeing

Less than half of businesses believe they have a duty of care to employee health, according to a recently released report from Morgan Redwood, with only 46% of firms regarding staff health as an employer?s responsibility. This is despite the fact that 82.8% of companies believe that business performance and staff wellbeing are connected.

The research, conducted by leadership development firm Morgan Redwood, is based on responses from the heads of human resource departments or board directors from more than 250 businesses. These have been drawn from across the UK and from a mix of sectors and a range of company sizes, with two thirds employing in excess of 250 people and none less than 50.

The statistic of 46% is in contrast to a previous Morgan Redwood study conducted in 2009, where 95% of businesses believed they did have a duty of care to the health of their employees.

Of the respondents questioned in the study, 25.6% believe that business performance was very closely connected to staff wellbeing, with a further 57.2% seeing them as quite connected. Only 6.8% of the business leaders questioned regarded performance and wellbeing as not at all connected.

The report also found that helping staff to achieve a better work-life balance was low on the list of HR priorities, as it ranked joint tenth, with only 6% of those questioned seeing it as a key aspect of their HR strategy. Employee wellbeing featured even lower, with just 5.6% of businesses considering it to be a priority, putting it at twelfth on the list. Attracting better talent to the business (39.2%) claimed the top spot, followed by reducing staff churn (36.8%) and reducing staff costs (34.8%) in second and third place, respectively.