Recover four days a year per person and you cover what this costs to run — from year two.

Your absence report is showing you a fraction of the problem.

Sick days are the part you can see. Depending on whose count you use, that is 4.4 days per worker across the whole labour market (ONS), or 9.4 days per employee in the average organisation (CIPD’s survey of 1,100 HR professionals) — the highest that figure has been, against 5.8 before the pandemic.

That number is real, and it is nowhere near the whole cost. Once you count the people who are at their desk but running on empty — the ones who came in with a migraine, who haven't slept properly in a fortnight, who are managing a bad back through a full day of meetings — the figure is 49.7 productive days per employee. Whichever absence number you started from, you are looking at somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the real cost.

Deloitte price the presenteeism half of it at roughly £24bn of the £51bn a year that poor mental health costs UK employers. It is the largest single component, and it is the one no absence policy has ever touched.

Two causes take three-quarters of the days.

It is worth being precise about why people are off, because it decides what an employer can sensibly do about it. The Health and Safety Executive counts 40.1 million working days lost a year to work-related ill health and workplace injury.

Two things take most of it: 22.1 million days to stress, depression or anxiety, and 7.1 million to musculoskeletal problems — backs, necks, shoulders, knees.

On the musculoskeletal half — specifically low back pain — this stops being an association and becomes a clinical recommendation.

NICE guidance to the NHS on low back pain is to “consider a group exercise programme” — not as a lifestyle note at the end of the leaflet, but as management of the condition. Underneath it sits a Cochrane review of 249 trials and more than 24,000 people, which found exercise reduced pain by around 15 points on a 100-point scale against no treatment or usual care.

The bigger half of that chart — stress, depression and anxiety — is not something a training programme treats, and I’m not going to borrow the evidence from the other half and pretend it is. My side of that one is narrow and unglamorous: a fixed appointment in the week, other people in the room, and something to be good at that isn’t work. Worth having. Not a treatment, and not what I’d ask you to buy this on.

Offices produce those backs for unexciting reasons: hours in one position, with almost none of the loading the muscles that hold a spine steady are supposed to get. The usual employer answer is equipment — a chair assessment, a standing desk, a footrest. All fine, and all aimed at making the sitting less bad rather than at the thing that changes the outcome. A better chair doesn’t load anything.

That is why two of every five sessions in the programme are desk-mobility work and the strength sessions lead the week. It is the unglamorous version on purpose.

The full research behind all of this — the sources, the numbers, and the parts of it I think are oversold — is written up here: Your wellbeing budget isn’t the problem. The turnout is.

You're probably not under-providing. Nobody's turning up.

The average UK employer already runs 47 separate wellbeing measures. Cycle schemes, EAP lines, gym discounts, apps, webinars, a mental-health first-aider.

A quarter of staff use them. Of the people who do, 85% say they help. So the support works. It just doesn't reach anyone.

This is the whole game. Every platform in this market sells you access — a network of 110,000 gyms, a library of 50,000 classes, an app with a step counter. Access has never been the bottleneck. Turning up is.

Your team is already losing 49.7 productive days each. Recovering just four of them back — eight percent — is the break-even point from year two: at a £150 working day that’s £600 per employee per year, or £11.50 a week, covered. Year one also carries the one-off £2,000 setup, so full break-even in year one is closer to four and a half days.

The part most wellbeing budgets miss.

Women between 45 and 55 are often the most experienced people in a business. They are also the group most likely to be working through menopause symptoms — broken sleep, joint pain, brain fog, energy on the floor — and the least likely to mention it to anyone.

Most corporate wellbeing packages have nothing for them. A gym network and a meditation app don't touch this. Menopause and midlife women's coaching is one of the main reasons women find me in the first place, and your team gets that same coaching as part of the package.

Why this one matters to the business, not just to them

In February 2024 the Equality and Human Rights Commission published guidance on what employers owe staff going through menopause.

Menopause is not a protected characteristic in its own right. But how symptoms are handled can amount to sex, age or disability discrimination, and where symptoms are severe and long-lasting enough to meet the disability threshold, there is a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments. Tribunal claims referencing menopause have been rising for years.

I'm not a lawyer, and this is not a compliance product. What I'd say is this: a gym discount is not a positive step. A named coach running a documented programme aimed squarely at this group is a much better answer to "what have you actually put in place?"

Nobody has to declare anything. Nobody goes on a list. It isn't a medical service — anyone with symptoms should talk to their GP or a menopause specialist about treatment. My side is the training, the nutrition, the sleep and the strength.

Who is actually running this.

Me. Not an account manager, not a marketplace of freelancers, and not a rota. Every programme on this page is written by hand by one coach and delivered by the same one.

I’m Pete Gawtry. 12 awards, 4× UK’s Best PT, coaching out of my own studio at Suite 1, Arena Business Park, Tarn Lane, Leeds, LS17 9BF, and online across the UK. The trophies are all listed with the year and the awarding body if you want to check them: the trophy cabinet. You can also walk round the studio before you talk to me.

That is the trade-off, stated honestly: one coach is the reason the programme reaches people that a platform never does, and it is also the reason there is a limit on how many companies I take at once. If the timing matters to you, ask on the call.

I'm not going to promise you fewer sick days.

What I will promise is narrower and, I’d argue, more useful: you’ll get your own monthly delivery report — sessions delivered, sessions cancelled and seats under contract, names off — so you can see exactly what you paid for actually happened, not a national average or a vendor’s case study.

That won’t tell you whether health outcomes are changing — no monthly report can — but a stalled rollout shows up in month two instead of at renewal.