Wellbeing Governance: Why Boards Need a Strategic Approach

The board member who pulled me aside after a governance meeting last year had a confession. Her organization ran multiple wellbeing initiatives—mental health first aiders, an employee assistance program, regular wellness communications. All looked great on paper. But absence rates kept climbing. Turnover stayed high. And the board? They got quarterly updates from HR that everything was fine.

“I don’t think we’re actually governing wellbeing,” she told me. “We’re just ticking boxes.”

She was right. And she’s not alone.

After seventeen years working at board level and through my work as an FRSPH Fellow, I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. Organizations treat wellbeing as an HR program to manage rather than a strategic imperative to govern. Boards get reassuring dashboards while missing the underlying organizational health issues that’ll eventually show up as operational risk, talent crises, or worse.

The CIPD’s 2025 Health and Wellbeing report shows 74% of respondents say wellbeing is on senior leaders’ agendas. But being on the agenda isn’t the same as being governed properly. Most boards haven’t figured out what effective wellbeing governance actually looks like.

Why Wellbeing Governance Matters Now

Here’s what’s changed. Wellbeing used to be about compliance—health and safety regulations, duty of care basics. Nice-to-have initiatives if you had budget left over.

Not anymore.

Wellbeing is now a material governance issue for several reasons. First, the financial impact is enormous. Deloitte’s research puts poor mental health alone at £51 billion annually to UK employers. That’s not an HR issue. That’s a risk management issue.

Second, regulatory attention is increasing. The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 already requires employers to ensure employee health, safety, and welfare—including mental health. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 explicitly require risk assessments covering mental health. Boards that think wellbeing is optional haven’t read the legislation.

Third, ESG expectations now include workforce wellbeing. Investors, customers, and other stakeholders assess how organizations treat their people. Your wellbeing governance—or lack of it—affects your social impact credentials, your ability to attract talent, your reputation.

Fourth, organizational performance depends on workforce wellbeing. Healthy, engaged employees deliver better results. Burned out, stressed, disengaged workforces don’t. This isn’t soft stuff. It’s operational reality.

What Wellbeing Governance Actually Means

So what does it mean to govern wellbeing strategically rather than just managing programs?

Governing wellbeing means the board treats it like any other material risk or strategic priority. You wouldn’t delegate financial oversight entirely to the finance team without board review. You wouldn’t handle cyber risk purely as an IT matter without board-level attention. Why would wellbeing be different?

Effective wellbeing governance includes several elements.

Board-level oversight and accountability. Someone at board level needs clear responsibility for wellbeing governance. Often this sits with a board committee—audit and risk, or increasingly, a dedicated people or wellbeing committee. But wherever accountability sits, it needs to be explicit.

Integration with strategy and risk management. Wellbeing isn’t separate from business strategy. It’s integral to executing strategy successfully. Your growth plans assume you can attract and retain talent. Your innovation goals depend on people having mental space for creative thinking. Your efficiency targets require engaged, productive teams. Wellbeing governance means explicitly connecting workforce health to strategic objectives.

The risk framework needs to include wellbeing risks—high absence, turnover, burnout, poor mental health. These aren’t just HR metrics. They’re operational risks that affect delivery, succession planning, organizational resilience.

Regular, meaningful reporting. Not quarterly dashboards showing how many people used the wellness app. Reporting that tells the board about organizational health, emerging risks, the effectiveness of interventions. Metrics that actually matter—absence trends, turnover in critical roles, engagement data, stress-related issues, early warning indicators.

Evidence-based interventions. Research from CIPD’s 2025 Health and Wellbeing Report shows that 74% of organizations now have health and wellbeing on senior leaders’ agendas, emphasizing the need for systematic approaches informed by what actually works, not just copying what other organizations do.

Cultural leadership from the top. The board sets organizational culture, whether intentionally or not. If board members and senior executives model overwork, always-on availability, and burnout culture, wellbeing initiatives won’t land. If the board genuinely prioritizes sustainable performance, that permission flows through the organization.

Where Most Boards Go Wrong

I’ve observed several common mistakes boards make with wellbeing governance.

Mistake 1: Treating it purely as HR’s job. Yes, HR implements wellbeing programs. But boards govern risk, strategy, and organizational health. Wellbeing touches all three. Delegating completely to HR means the board isn’t exercising its governance role.

Mistake 2: Focusing on programs instead of culture. Offering mental health training is great. But if your culture drives people to exhaustion, training won’t fix that. Effective wellbeing governance addresses root causes—workload, management practices, organizational culture—not just symptoms.

Mistake 3: Measuring activity instead of outcomes. Boards get reports showing participation in wellbeing programs. What they need is data on organizational health and whether interventions improve it. Are absence rates declining? Is retention improving? Are stress-related issues decreasing? Those are the measures that matter.

Mistake 4: Treating wellbeing as an add-on. Wellbeing gets discussed separately from strategy, separate from risk, separate from operational performance. Effective governance integrates wellbeing into all these discussions because it affects all of them.

Mistake 5: Not challenging management appropriately. When management reports that wellbeing programs are working fine but organizational metrics suggest otherwise, effective boards ask hard questions. Are we addressing real issues or just running programs? What evidence shows our approach is working? What are we missing?

A Framework for Strategic Wellbeing Governance

Based on both research and practical experience, here’s what effective wellbeing governance looks like at board level.

Start with clarity about responsibility. Which board member or committee owns wellbeing governance? Make it explicit. Ensure they have appropriate expertise or access to expert input. Organizational wellbeing isn’t something you can govern effectively without understanding the evidence base and best practice.

Define what good looks like. What does organizational wellbeing mean for your specific context? What outcomes are you aiming for? Not vague aspirations—specific, measurable indicators of organizational health. These become your governance targets.

Build it into risk management. Include wellbeing risks in your risk register. Assess them regularly. Understand the potential impact of high absence, turnover, burnout. Monitor leading indicators that signal emerging problems before they become crises.

Demand proper reporting. Work with management to develop reporting that gives the board what it needs to govern effectively. This typically includes:

• Workforce health metrics (absence, turnover, retention in critical roles)
• Engagement and culture data
• Stress and mental health indicators
• Early warning signs of problems
• Evaluation of intervention effectiveness
• Progress against wellbeing strategy objectives

Challenge the narrative. When you hear “our wellbeing programs are great,” ask how you know they’re working. What’s the evidence? What are people actually experiencing? Where are the gaps between what we say and what we do?

Connect it to everything else. Don’t discuss wellbeing in isolation. When you’re reviewing growth plans, ask about workforce capacity and wellbeing implications. When assessing operational risks, include wellbeing factors. When evaluating organizational performance, factor in engagement and retention data.

Model it. As board members, demonstrate that sustainable performance matters. Challenge always-on culture. Question unrealistic timelines. Show that you value quality over just speed. Culture flows from the top. What the board reinforces becomes organizational norm.

Review and adapt. Wellbeing governance isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. Regular review of approach, metrics, and effectiveness needs to be built into board rhythms. The British Safety Council’s Five Star Wellbeing Audit model and similar frameworks can provide external validation of whether your approach matches best practice.

The Business Case Boards Actually Care About

Here’s the reality boards need to hear. Strategic wellbeing governance delivers measurable business benefits.

Business in the Community research suggests financial returns from wellbeing investment could reach significant levels. Organizations with good wellbeing governance see reduced absence, lower turnover, better performance, stronger ability to attract talent, enhanced reputation, and improved resilience during uncertainty or change.

This isn’t about being a nice employer. It’s about organizational effectiveness and risk management.

Without effective wellbeing governance, you’re accepting preventable financial losses, operational risks from workforce issues, talent acquisition and retention challenges, regulatory and reputational exposure, and reduced organizational performance and adaptability.

Moving from Theory to Practice

If you’re a board member reading this thinking “we need to improve our wellbeing governance,” here’s where to start.

First, assess current state honestly. Do we actually govern wellbeing, or do we just receive reports? Can we clearly articulate our wellbeing strategy and objectives? Do we know what evidence our wellbeing approaches are based on? Can we see the links between wellbeing and organizational performance in our data?

Second, establish clear board-level accountability. Who owns this? What does their role involve? What expertise do they need?

Third, work with management to develop proper governance processes. Define objectives, establish meaningful metrics, create appropriate reporting, integrate with risk management, build into strategic planning.

Fourth, get external input if needed. An organizational wellbeing audit can provide baseline assessment, identify gaps, benchmark against best practice, and create evidence-based improvement plans. This gives boards the assurance that approach is sound and the data to govern effectively.

The Governance Advantage

Organizations that govern wellbeing strategically rather than just managing programs have a genuine competitive advantage. They attract better talent. They keep their best people. They perform better. They’re more resilient. They make better strategic decisions because their leadership teams aren’t running on empty.

The boards that figure this out early—before wellbeing is a crisis requiring urgent intervention—position their organizations for sustained success. Those that wait until forced to act by circumstance find themselves playing expensive catch-up while competitors pull ahead.

Wellbeing governance isn’t complicated. But it requires boards to recognize that workforce wellbeing is a governance issue, not just an HR program. Get that right, and everything else becomes more straightforward.

If you’re working through how to establish effective wellbeing governance or would like to understand where your organization currently stands, a conversation about your specific situation can help clarify the path forward. This work shapes organizational capability and performance for years to come. Worth getting right.

References

• British Safety Council (2024). Five Star Wellbeing Audit. British Safety Council. Available at: https://www.britsafe.org/audit-and-consultancy/all-audits/five-star-wellbeing-audit

• Business in the Community (2024). Financial Return on Investing in Wellbeing. BITC. Available at: https://www.bitc.org.uk/news/financial-return-on-investing-in-wellbeing-could-be-up-to-370-billion-new-research-shows/

• CIPD (2024). Health and Wellbeing at Work 2024. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/reports/health-well-being-work/

• Deloitte (2024). Mental Health and Employers: The Case for Investment. Deloitte. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/about/press-room/poor-mental-health-costs-uk-employers-51-billion-a-year-for-employees.html

• Health and Safety Executive (2024). Mental Health at Work. HSE. Available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/mental-health.htm

• CIPD (2025). Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/reports/health-well-being-work/