Whether you buy into the wellness industry’s annual ‘New Year, New You’ seduction or not, there’s no doubt that January is a good opportunity to look ahead and make plans for the next twelve months.
As our features on 2024 and key learnings reflected, last year was tricky due to many factors from economic to political uncertainty. While there is still much instability, trend forecasters are generally predicting that 2025 will be more stable – not least because the United States of America now knows (for better or for worse, remains to be seen) who its President is for the next four years.
We asked leading Health and Wellbeing experts to tell us the key challenges they think industry professionals need to be aware of – and thoughts on how to tackle them.
Increased focus on ROI to get and keep C-Suite buy in
As part of our planning process, Make A Difference Media and our sister company The Watercooler Events commissioned some research amongst industry practitioners. One question asked about their biggest challenges and this one ranked highly in the qualitative feedback.
One respondent described a familiar scenario. With the industry generally acknowledging that employee Health and Wellbeing needs to be addressed at the core, job design level (rather than through periphery initiatives) there’s a recognition that this requires restructuring and widescale change.
“Organisational wellbeing looks at changing the way we set ourselves up to work, and this is not what a lot of C-Suite want to accept” says one respondent.
“It is a very traditional environment with senior leaders who have been in the business a long time, so it is difficult to change things or bring in anything new or innovative,” says another.
Consequently, professionals need to focus on preparing robust ROI arguments for why investment in employee wellbeing makes financial sense.
However, on the bright side, the qualitative insights from the research revealed that budgets are generally up for 2025 and of more concern to practitioners are competing business priorities, overcoming siloes and getting buy-in from different departments.
Investment in line manager training
Line managers are increasingly recognised as central to the success of employee wellbeing. For this reason, MHFA England Chief Executive, Sarah McIntosh, predicts that “the importance of managers and leaders in promoting wellbeing will remain a critical focus”.
However, in order to do this, managers need support. As Dr Jo Yarker, Professor in Occupational Psychology at Birkbeck University of London, says, the industry has “long since” recognised this but she hopes 2025 will be the year that we “see a move beyond this awareness to skill development, focusing on key behaviours and practices that make a difference”.
One thing that is likely to make a difference is line managers understanding that investing time in their own and their team’s health and wellbeing will, in the long run, lead to better productivity and working relationships. The issue currently is that many see it as another chore ‘to do’ contributing to a sense of overwhelm that can ultimately lead to burnout.
Increased understanding might also lead to a greater sense of accountability from managers, too, something one survey respondent said is lacking in their organisation among managers as well as leaders.
Keeping up with new tech, especially AI
Digital tools and AI powered solutions are bound to keep launching at a rapid pace in 2025, with huge advances being made seemingly overnight at the moment.
Jackie Buttery, Head of Benefits and Reward, Human Resources, Travers Smith, confirms that this is an issue “we are all starting to think about” at her organisation and feels like “somewhat uncharted territory”. She predicts this tech revolution will see “many changes to our working practices”.
She hasn’t mapped out the consequences for wellbeing yet, but hopes the impact of AI will be “positive for many”.
“But, nonetheless, change can be unsettling and people may have less certainty and may feel their sense of wellbeing is knocked in the short term,” she says.
IOSH’s Chief Executive Vanessa Harwood-Whitcher advises that introducing these technologies requires “transparency, clear justification and communicating reasons for the decision”.
She recommends including organisation-wide consultation, ensuring due diligence and adherence to legal obligations and responsibilities.
Keeping up with the rapid pace of change in general
With change happening on so many fronts, this is bound to be a biggie in 2025.
As we wrote about last year, the Labour government is ramping up reforms in the wellbeing/mental health space, declaring its desire to shift to a preventative culture, which employers will have to keep abreast of.
“The new government is expected to bring significant reforms aimed at improving working conditions,” says McIntosh. “For example, policies promoting greater work-life balance, fair pay, and enhanced worker protections.”
One of the government reforms garnering most interest relates to the Mental Health Act. MHFA England’s McIntosh hopes that this “may encourage more open dialogue and drive organisations to adopt policies aligning with the updated legislation”.
All these reforms will certainly mean new compliance requirements for organisations. Navigating change, and employing leaders/managers who are skilled in this, will be key for success overcoming this challenge.
Professionals need to be on the lookout for “change fatigue” among employees, and have solutions to mitigate this phenomenon. Wellbeing experts like Health and Wellbeing consultant Amy Mckeown, for example, expect to do more work in the arena of “organisational change, transition and culture” in 2025.
An upside of this focused government attention is that leaders (mentioned in challenge number 1) will not be able to avoid the issue. McIntosh is also optimistic that it will pave the way for “greater integration of wellbeing into business strategy” with organisations increasingly “not treating wellbeing as an add-on, but as a fundamental driver of long-term success”.
The wellbeing of employees who are carers
This is one of Buttery’s biggest priorities in 2025 on account of the increased employer’s national insurance requirements from April.
“The care sector is already in a state of crisis but with this, it’s quite possible the care sector will shrink further in 2025,” she says. “That worries me greatly and that’s sure to impact carers and parents. In a childcare context, there is a threat of nurseries closing or pushing up their prices which employees will struggle to afford.”
She predicts that it will affect those employees caring for elderly friends and relatives too.
“There is a risk of significant worry for employees with ageing parents, who may well be forced to shoulder some of the care needs themselves,” she says. “These care challenges just can’t be solved by a neat corporate benefit, so it’s likely employees will need to take more time off if the care givers just aren’t there.”
The Health and Wellbeing of younger generations
We’ve covered this topic in depth at the end of last year (see here for our feature on why so many younger people are out of work and here on why so many managers find Gen Z ‘difficult’).
As Dame Carol Black said at our Leader’s Lunch “we’ve got an increasing problem with young people” which affects an organisation’s ability to create a sustainable workforce. The problems – in terms of getting younger employees into work, and rising levels of mental ill health amongst these generations – have been well documented in the mainstream media.
Dame Carol recommends making a concerted effort to really understand your younger employees and prospective recruits through tools like surveys and focus groups.
“CEOs and Heads of HR have got to get their heads around the fact that different generations of workers are not the same. They must listen to young people’s concerns and try very hard to put the right support in the workplace,” she says.
Tackling the ‘woke backlash’ whilst continuing to integrate DE&I with health and wellbeing
In this feature on challenges in 2024, we mentioned scepticism around DEI gathering momentum, with high profile employers reportedly cutting high profile roles in the sector. (Read more on this here).
This backlash, and sensationalist media coverage around it, is bound to bleed into 2025 and will be a challenge to address.
The best way to approach it, as Roxanne Hoobs, Founder of the Hobbs Consultancy, argues, is to view it as an opportunity to potentially “bring more balance to the agenda”.
This is a good time to take an objective view of your approach whilst continuing to look at ways to integrate DE&I with health and wellbeing.
As the late Apple entrepreneur Steve Jobs said – words that could be applied to all the issues identified in this feature for 2025 – “innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity, not a threat”.
