No doubt 95%+ of businesses want to improve the health and engagement levels of their workforce. We live in a time of unprecedented speed of change. It’s easy to argue that employee health and engagement has always been important.
Today, however, due to a variety of factors, employee health and engagement levels are moving away from important to essential.
A few major shifts are making this an ongoing shift:
1 - Business success is decreasingly reliant on human ‘physical labour’ and increasingly reliant on human ‘mental labour’. For employees to be agile, collaborative and innovative they need to be healthy and engaged.
2 - The job market has become increasingly competitive. People no longer stay in jobs they don’t enjoy because there’s nothing else available. If they don’t love their work, they’ll find something else without too much effort.
3 - People's lifestyles, in general, are becoming increasingly unhealthy. More time sedentary, more alcohol and processed foods and more time comparing ourselves to others on social media. As a nation, we’ve experienced record levels of poor physical and mental health.
These three factors combined are what is making employee engagement and wellbeing so increasingly important to businesses in all industries of all shapes and sizes.
Regardless of the features and benefits of the different approaches, one of the key questions anybody in a business needs to answer is ‘how much is it going to cost?’. Price matters, it’s not the only consideration but it is an important one. Businesses, departments and teams have budgets. Having an idea of what’s available and at what costs enables you to make informed decisions.
It’s not straightforward to give a straight-cut answer to the question posed as the title of this blog. There are so many different solutions available and within each of those solutions a lot of variety and options. There can be a lot of movement on price due to factors such as the size of your company and the volume of employees you wish to support. This means that it can be difficult to have any idea of the price until you’ve filled out a ‘request a quote’ form and spent 30 minutes on the phone with someone.
At Better Happy we want every business to thrive and every employee to be happy. Therefore we want to educate any person within a business making employee engagement and well-being a priority on what’s available to them. Even if this leads you to a different provider we’re still happy because we’ve helped you take action. We also understand that we can’t help everyone and that we’re not the best fit for everyone.
I’ll do my best to offer some clear price ranges for employee wellbeing and engagement training based on 2022 pricing currently available.
What types of services are available
The employee engagement and wellbeing market is still emerging and fast-growing. When you begin to look into it you will start off overwhelmed by the sheer volume in the variety of services available. In this article, I’m covering the costs of providing your employees with training in these areas. Other services include:
Software to support engagement and wellbeing
Surveys, insights and accreditations
Business, change, culture consulting
Employee assistance programs
Private health and insurance
121 counselling and therapy
Perks, Gifts, Incentives
All of the above have their place as well as their pros and cons. I’ll create a separate blog comparing these solutions with their pros and cons and a future date.
How Much Does Engagement & Wellbeing Training Cost?
An engagement/wellbeing training course is on average 1-3 days long with a costing between £1000-£5000+ per person. The courses I’m exploring are geared towards leaders/managers/champions as opposed to the whole workforce.
Gallup - Creating an Engaging Workplace Course
Cost - £2160pp
Length - 2 days
Location - Virtual
Gallup are global leaders in workplace surveys and analytics. They’ve worked with and helped an eye-boggling number of companies and their strengths tools is used in 90% of fortune 500 companies. It’s safe to say Gallup knows their stuff. Their focus is on building exceptional workplaces. The ‘Creating an Engaging Workplace’ covers everything one needs to know about engagement in the workplace. The course also provides participants with Gallup resources and tools to implement what they have learnt from the course in the workplace.
Pros:
Developed by a world insights leader
Delivered by experienced and qualified instructors
Supported with Gallup high standard tools and resources
Support provided to attendees after course
Link to the course - Here
CIPD - Employee Wellbeing
Cost - £490pp
Duration - 1 Day
Location - Virtual
The Chartered Institute of Personal Development are the go-to training provider for any HR professional in the UK. I love their mission which is ‘to ensure that work benefits everyone. Any training that CIPD provide awards participants with CPD (continuing professional development) credits. Although I’m unable to find an employee engagement course on the CIPD site at the moment, they are currently running an employee wellbeing course. This course is designed by wellbeing at work excerpt Shona McFarlane. The course is well thought out and covers all essential areas ranging from how to define well-being, to how to improve physical and mental well-being to example wellbeing strategies in the workplace.
Pros:
CIPD accredited
Designed by workplace wellbeing expert Shona McFarlane
Covers policy and HR
Covers all aspects of well-being at work
Link to the course - Here
Luminate - Wellbeing Champion Training
Cost - £1400 (up for up to 16 people)
Duration - 2 x 2 hour sessions
Location - Virtual
Founded in 2015 by Melissa Crate, Luminate and have the mission of dramatically improving mental health in the workplace. What really stands out to me is how Luminate focuses on leaders, the workplace and the employees. As stated in their mission, Luminate leans towards the mental health side of wellbeing (easily arguable as the most important). They have a fantastic team of coaches supporting them and provide a wide variety of services that could be tailored to almost any business. You can download Luminate’s brochure via their homepage.
Pros:
Created and delivered by a passionate knowledgeable team
Group format makes the sessions good value for money
Covers how to improve the well-being for the participant and the organisation
Empower attendees to support colleagues who might be suffering
Link to course - here
Haptivate
Haptivate have been around since 2018 with the mission of providing practical training to improve well-being at work. Haptivate provides workshops, training and consulting. They have worked with an amazing variety of clients since 2018 and their website is full of social proof validating that what they deliver is of great quality. They have a variety of courses and workshops available on their site.
Pros -
Great team with a wide variety of knowledge
Extensive client base of companies big and small
Great mission and vision
Courses to suit all
I'm unable to locate Haptivates pricing on their site but wanted to include them in this post. They have a 4 day in person leadership course listed at £1395. You can find out more by visiting their site - Here
Better Happy - Optimise
Cost - £1000pp
Duration - 3 days
Location - On-site
We founded Better Happy in 2018 with the vision of every employee happy and every business thriving. Our vision and values are very much aligned to each of the amazing companies I have shared above. We also provide a range of services but our flagship service is the optimise program designed for senior staff and managers. We’re a small team and feel that our place in the market is addressing wellbeing, engagement and performance (burnout prevention) in one course. You can find out more about our pricing here.
Pros:
Linking health, engagement and performance together
Delivered in-person to teams
Supported with tools to follow up
There are of course many many more providers of wellbeing and engagement training available. What I've tried to do here is give you an overall idea of what is available and roughly what you can expect to spend per person which you can multiply to establish group training costs.
I hope this blog has been helpful for you.