The Wellbeing Illusion: Why Most Organizations Are Spending More on Wellbeing and Getting Less in Return, with Gethin Nadin

Gethin Nadin is Chief Advisory Officer at Benifex, part of the Zellis executive team, a Fellow at King's Business School and the chair of the Policy Liaison Group on Workplace Wellbeing, the Westminster think tank he founded to put employers in the same room as policymakers. He started as a manager of seventeen people at twenty-three, in financial services, watching good people underperform because of what was happening to them outside work. Two decades and two bestselling books later, that is still the question he is working on.

This is the first episode of Culture Litmus, the Season 07 series on the gap between what organizations claim about their people and what they can evidence. Wellbeing is the natural place to start, because it is the line item that has grown fastest and is measured least. Gethin's argument across the hour is that the money is real, the intent is real, and most of it never reaches anyone.

Not a generosity problem

Employers have been investing heavily in wellbeing, benefits and general support, and the UK still ranks second lowest in the world for employee experience. Gethin's first move is to rule out the obvious explanation. This is not a generosity problem. Organizations have become very good at adding things and not very good at designing and delivering them, so large numbers of employees do not know the support exists, do not understand how it works, or cannot see how it applies to them.

“If you can't find something, if you don't understand it, or it's difficult to access when you need it, that investment might as well not exist.”

Gethin Nadin

Chief Advisory Officer, Benifex

His definition of the design and delivery failure is an organization spending millions on wellbeing programs while its people still say they are overwhelmed, unsupported or disconnected, and measuring the number of things it does rather than whether any of them change an outcome. Underneath that sits a deeper misallocation: years of investment in managing the symptoms of ill health, and much less in preventing it.

Investment employees cannot find might as well not exist

The phrase Gethin coined is the spine of the episode, and he gives three reasons spending fails to reach people.

A frictionless strategy, in his description, is not a collection of products but a way of working: a clear purpose, executive ownership, a five to ten year commitment rather than a one to three year plan, and above all a habit of running decisions through a wellbeing lens. His example is an expense policy. Ask a twenty-three-year-old living payday to payday to fund a train ticket and wait thirty days, and the workplace is the thing causing the stress.

“You can't compensate for poor workplace design with a collection of wellbeing interventions.”

Gethin Nadin

Chief Advisory Officer, Benifex

A societal problem that shows up at work

Gethin set up the Policy Liaison Group because wellbeing is easy to treat as an organizational challenge when it is increasingly a societal one that happens to materialize in the workplace. Across most developed economies the indicators are moving the wrong way: rising economic inactivity, rising sickness absence, growing mental health need, mounting pressure on healthcare. Employers feel the consequences first, in productivity, recruitment and retention, and in the UK they are often trying to solve problems no single organization can address.

The group's aim is a direct line between employers and policymakers in both directions: government understanding what good work looks like in practice, and employers getting the incentives and freedoms to deliver it. He is careful about where responsibility sits. Employers step in because the problems affect their people, but they are not responsible for public health. In September the group publishes the UK's first duty of care guidelines for policymakers, launched in the Houses of Parliament and delivered the same day to Downing Street.

Money is the last taboo at work

Financial wellbeing has been in the benefits space for years, and Gethin built one of the first workplace financial education tools with Barclays around fifteen years ago. It stays peripheral for a cultural reason: people will discuss almost any other part of their health before admitting they are struggling financially, and employers worry that raising money is an intrusion. He sees the same arc mental health went through, and expects it to resolve the same way.

The case for moving it to the center is that financial stress does not stay at home. It shows up in concentration, decision-making, sleep and absence, and it consumes cognitive bandwidth. His own framework runs from immediate stress at one end to long-term security at the other.

The organizations making progress treat financial wellbeing as a strategic capability rather than a rescue package for people in crisis, and they measure it against productivity and retention rather than uptake.

The system eating itself

The episode's sharpest argument is about managers. Financial stress is assumed to be a low-pay problem, and it is heavily weighted that way, but people earning six figures worry too, about different things, at the same intensity. Psychologists call the effect cognitive scarcity: attention narrows onto the money, and the capacity that would have gone to decisions, creativity and relationships is spent. Layer that on the person responsible for coaching a team, and the picture is obvious.

Managers are the single most important factor in most people's experience of work. Zellis research found that managers under financial stress are more likely to report that it affects their ability to lead. That manager becomes less present, less able to coach and less able to notice that someone else is struggling, not because they do not care but because they are carrying their own load.

“The very people organizations rely on to create healthy, engaged and productive teams are actually increasingly experiencing the same financial pressures as everyone else.”

Gethin Nadin

Chief Advisory Officer, Benifex

Embedded versus bolted on

The structural difference between organizations that embed wellbeing and those that bolt it on is the question they start from.

“We don't just pull people out of the wreckage of a crash. We walk up the road to see why those cars are crashing in the first place.”

Gethin Nadin

Chief Advisory Officer, Benifex

The 90-day non-negotiable

Asked for one action every CHRO should take in the next ninety days, Gethin would rather stop talking about wellbeing altogether and talk about performance. The label has become so overused that it disconnects the work from business outcomes, and the moment a conversation is filed under wellbeing, leaders hear an HR issue.

The action, then, is to identify the one to three business priorities that matter most to the CEO and CFO and connect every people investment to them explicitly. His worked example is AI. Almost every company has doubled its AI investment, half of CEOs say their reputation depends on getting it right, and the most successful adoptions are cultural rather than technical: people who feel cared for, included and psychologically safe are the ones who use the tools. A financial wellbeing program that makes managers more effective is a productivity and AI story, and it should be sold as one.

Only a minority of HR leaders can make that connection today, and he thinks the future belongs to the ones who can.

“Investing in people isn't a cost of doing business, but actually one of the most reliable drivers of organizational success.”

Gethin Nadin

Chief Advisory Officer, Benifex

What listening platforms should catch

Gethin describes employee listening as one of the most underused wellbeing tools available, and gives the episode its most quotable line unprompted.

“There is nothing that will increase employee engagement faster than asking employees what they think, but equally nothing will destroy that trust more quickly than asking for that feedback and then doing nothing with it.”

Gethin Nadin

Chief Advisory Officer, Benifex

The problem is rarely the asking. Organizations run surveys, pulses and focus groups. Employees learn quickly whether their feedback is valued or merely collected, and stop participating when it is the latter. What makes listening powerful is that it captures the one thing objective measures miss, which is how people actually feel, and it does so early. Absence and attrition are lagging indicators. By the time someone resigns the decision was made six months ago.

It also tells you when the support you have bought is not reaching anyone, which is where the conversation began. Used well, he thinks it moves wellbeing from reactive to predictive, and the organizations that get the most from it will treat employee feedback as a strategic data source rather than an annual HR exercise.