Making the business case for employers

Over recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of encouraging people to make healthy choices. To do this we need to change people's attitudes, behaviour and practices.

With people spending 60% of their waking hours in work, it is an ideal place to support a healthier lifestyle. This has been further reinforced by recent NICE guidance where the main implementers are not the NHS or even local authorities but private companies and small business. But this idea brings its own challenges. The benefits of a healthier population to the NHS and local partners are clear, but what about the benefits to the employer? After all, they are the organisations who need to put the plans for a healthier workforce into action.

In fact experience has shown that there are many benefits of a healthy workforce to an organisation and a number of these benefits can have a positive impact on the organisation's financial position. In order to highlight these benefits and allow companies to put workforce health onto their business agenda we have created a number of 'business plan' templates which can be used by organisations to highlight the possible costs and savings of implementing different healthy workforce schemes and, hopefully, encourage them to help their workers change their lifestyle for the better. These templates can be adapted to reflect local circumstances, such as number of employees, and local costs can be used.

The most recent example is the business case template to support the guidance on workplace physical activity. This builds on feedback received following our first tools to support guidance on workplace smoking. Finally, don't forget that these templates can also be used by NHS organisations and Local Authorities to encourage a healthier lifestyle in their employees; after all, they are employers too!