Get four days a year back per person and this has already paid for itself.

Your absence report is showing you nine percent of the problem.

Sick days are the part you can see. UK workers took 4.4 of them each last year, 148.8 million across the country.

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.

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.

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. I need four of them back — eight percent — and the programme has paid for itself. That works out at £600 per employee per year, or £11.50 a week.

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.

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 engagement figures every month — names off, numbers on — so you can judge this on what actually happened in your team, not on a national average or a vendor's case study.

If it isn't working, you'll see it in month two rather than at renewal.