The Q4 wellbeing planning pack: seven decisions to make before you book anything
Most wellbeing plans are built backwards, starting from a calendar of awareness days and working out what to put in them. This pack starts from the decisions that actually determine whether the year lands, in the order they need making.
964,000 workers in Great Britain had work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, out of 1.9 million with work-related ill health of any kind. Stress is roughly half the total and the largest single category. It is the thing most wellbeing plans address last. HSE, key figures for Great Britain 2024/25
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The rest of the pack covers why autumn plans fail, then all seven decisions: what to decide, what a bad version of that decision looks like and the one question that settles it. One-off, you won’t need to do this again on this device.
The two ways an autumn wellbeing plan goes wrong
Both of them happen before a single session is booked, which is why they are so hard to fix later. September is the month to catch them.
It is built from the calendar, not the problem
The awareness calendar is a useful prompt and a terrible plan. Working from it produces a year of unconnected events chosen because of when they fall rather than what they fix, and it guarantees the wellbeing budget is spread evenly across problems your organisation may not have. A calendar tells you when people will be receptive to a topic. It cannot tell you which topic you need. Decide the problem first, then look for the moment that carries it.
Nobody agreed what “it worked” means
The second failure is quieter. A plan gets signed off with an implied measure nobody wrote down, so at the year end the conversation becomes attendance numbers and a feedback form, because those are the only numbers anyone collected. If you cannot say now what number you expect to move, you will be reporting on attendance in twelve months. The measure has to be chosen before delivery starts, because most of the useful ones need a reading taken beforehand.
Most organisations plan the autumn in September and then spend October to December delivering it. That is the wrong way round for anything that needs a baseline reading, a budget line or a board conversation. The work that has to happen this month is the deciding. If a decision below is still open at the end of September, it will be made for you by whatever is easiest to book.
Seven decisions, in the order they need making
Each one names the decision, the version of it that quietly goes wrong, and the single question that settles it. Work through them in order. Several of the later ones cannot be answered until the earlier ones are.
What does your own data already say?
Before any external research, read what you already hold. Sickness absence by reason and by team, exit interview themes from the last twelve months, EAP or occupational health referral patterns, grievance and capability volumes, and the free-text answers in your last engagement survey. Those five sources will usually name your problem more accurately than any benchmark, because they are about your organisation rather than the average one. The common mistake is skipping this because the data is messy. It does not need to be clean to be directional.
- The question that settles it: if I had to name our single biggest people problem from our own numbers, without looking at any external report, what would I say?
Which one problem are you actually solving?
Pick one. Not a theme, a problem. “Wellbeing” is not a problem, and neither is “mental health”. “Our managers do not know what to do when someone tells them they are struggling” is a problem, and it has a different answer from “our workload design is generating the cases in the first place”. A plan aimed at one problem with real depth beats a plan that touches five with a session each, and it is far easier to defend at budget time because you can say what it is for.
- The question that settles it: if only one thing changed by next summer, which change would make the biggest difference to how this place runs?
What will “it worked” look like, in a number?
Decide the measure now, and take the baseline reading before anything is delivered. Useful candidates: the proportion of managers who say they would feel confident having a mental health conversation, stress-related absence days, the share of exit interviews citing workload or management, or a single tracked item from your engagement survey. Attendance and satisfaction scores are worth collecting and are not evidence of anything. They tell you people turned up and enjoyed it.
- The question that settles it: what reading am I taking in the next three weeks so that I have something to compare against in July?
Have you covered the legal floor?
Separate from anything ambitious, there is a baseline duty. Employers must assess and manage the risk of work-related stress under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, and employers with five or more employees must record their findings. The HSE Management Standards set out the six areas that assessment is expected to cover: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. This is not the interesting part of a wellbeing plan, and it is the part that gets asked about when something goes wrong.
- The question that settles it: if we were asked tomorrow to produce our stress risk assessment, could we, and is it dated within the last year?
We have a separate guide on the six HSE Management Standards and what each one covers in practice. It goes into far more detail than there is room for here. It is a separate download with its own short form: the HSE stress Management Standards guide.
Where is the budget going, and is it where the leverage is?
Most wellbeing budgets are spent on things that reach everyone thinly. The leverage is usually narrower than that. A line manager population is typically a small fraction of the workforce and sits between the organisation and almost every problem in it, which makes it the cheapest place to buy a change in how it feels to work somewhere. That is an argument for concentration, not for spending more. The same budget aimed at forty managers will usually outperform the same budget spread across four hundred employees.
- The question that settles it: which group of people, if they behaved differently, would change the experience of the most other people?
When does it land, against your year rather than the calendar?
Now bring the awareness dates back in, but as scheduling rather than strategy. Sequence the plan against your own year first: your peak trading period, your restructure, your audit season, your budget cycle, the fortnight when nobody is available. Then place each piece on the nearest external moment that gives it a reason to exist. A session delivered into your busiest month will be poorly attended no matter how good it is, and the awareness day it was tied to will not save it.
- The question that settles it: which weeks of the next nine months are genuinely unavailable, and does the plan currently put anything in them?
Who owns it in March, when it is no longer new?
The last decision is the one most often left implicit, and it is the one that determines whether any of this survives. Launches have owners. Month seven rarely does. Name the person accountable for the plan after the launch energy has gone, put the review in the diary now with a date rather than a season, and decide what the standing agenda item is and whose meeting it sits in. A plan with no owner in March is a plan that quietly becomes a set of events that happened.
- The question that settles it: whose objectives does this sit in, and is that written down anywhere other than in my head?
Do two, three and seven. Name the one problem, write down the number that will tell you it moved and take that reading now, and put someone’s name against the plan for the second half of the year. Those three carry most of the difference between a wellbeing plan and a wellbeing calendar, and none of them costs anything.
Map your wellbeing strategy for the year ahead
If the deciding is the part you would rather not do alone, that is what our Wellbeing Strategy engagement is. It starts with a needs assessment across five pillars, comes back with a proposed strategy and delivery plan, and runs for twelve months with a review built in so it can adapt to what is landing.
Enquire about Wellbeing StrategyThis guide is general information for employers and people leaders. It is not legal advice, and the summary of employer duties above is not a compliance checklist. UK figures are from the Health and Safety Executive’s key figures for Great Britain, 2024/25, and the six Management Standards are as published by HSE. Related reading: our post on the difference between pressure and stress at work. Every session is tailored to your organisation before delivery.