Debra Clark, head of wellbeing at Towergate Employee Benefits explains the role of health and wellbeing support in the recruitment and retention challenge.
Recruiting and retaining the right people is business-critical for SME employers and our research shows that that this will be an especially big challenge in 2025.
Getting the right people who ‘fit’ with your business, sharing the same values and a great work ethic, is so important for smaller businesses to enable them to continue to thrive and grow. However, the job market is likely to become a tougher place for companies, with 47% of those surveyed by Towergate Employee Benefits stating that they believe it will be harder to recruit talent, and 44% stating they think it will be harder to retain talent in 2025.1
The Great Stay became infamous in 2024 when disengaged employees lacked the incentive to change jobs, but this is due to change, with a reported 39% of UK employees considering a new job in the next 12 months. 2 Employers will need to work hard to keep and retain top talent.
How can an SME ensure that they reduce their risk of recruitment, retention and engagement issues?
A real shake up in the way employers go about boosting the business is going to be required this year if employers are to find and retain enthusiastic, experienced and productive talent.
A massive 61% of employers believe how they support staff will play a crucial role in their
recruitment and retention strategies over the next 12 months and I couldn’t agree more.
Supporting staff starts with them feeling well supported and cared for by their company and looking after their health and wellbeing demonstrates this in a tangible way.
Over a third (36%) of employers surveyed said the way in which they support the health and wellbeing of their employees is a key reason people choose to work for them. Similarly, 35% said it is a key reason employees stay with them. Interestingly, 32% state that the health and wellbeing support they offer helps with the recruitment and retention of key demographics of employees, showing the importance of learning to adapt support to match the needs of the particular workforce.
Nearly a quarter (24%) of employers surveyed put their health and wellbeing package at the top of the list of areas that will increase most in importance at their company in terms of the recruitment and retention of talent. This was above support for mental health (20%) and well above support for financial health (12%), physical health (9%), social interaction (9%) and ESG (8%).
However, a significant 16% said the business does not offer enough health and wellbeing support and that this impacts their ability to recruit and retain talent. So this is clearly an area where employers still have work to do.
How can you support employee health and wellbeing?
Supporting the employees needs to start with the senior leadership team and them believing in the strategy. This goes a long way in creating the right overall culture for your business.
Then you need to consider the health and wellbeing package that you offer staff. The need for employee benefits supporting all four pillars of wellbeing – emotional, physical, financial and social – is critical and the support must be competitive. This means that employers must do their research and due diligence.
Talking to advisers will be a big part of this process. Benefits that will be crucial in recruitment but also in retention must be carefully crafted to match the demographic of the workforce. There are lots of new products and propositional developments in this market and keeping up to date can feel overwhelming so let a specialist do the hard work for you.
You may also find that there are aspects of your current support packages that are better (or worse) than you had thought. How suitable are they for your targeted employee requirements? Are there any gaps in the cover? Have you considered gender and age, for example, so that the supportive ethos of the company does not just attract employees through the door but also nurtures them to keep them with the business.
Once you know what your support packages should look like and contain you then need to ensure that they are properly communicated. There is no point offering the best benefit and support packages if no one knows about them and therefore they are not used. Do not fall into the trap of only communicating them at the typical key work life stages – joining, induction, job role change or annual review, but consistently, repeatedly in bite-size chunks. Employees need reminding of the support that exists for them.
Only if health and wellbeing support is comprehensively targeted and communicated will it meet the demands of its role in recruitment and retention. Then it will also achieve so much more in terms of the business as a whole.
- Research conducted by Opinium on behalf of Towergate Employee Benefits among 500 HR decision makers across the UK from 7 to 16 January 2025.
- What Workers Want Survey 2025 Findings | New Possible
