The evolving wellbeing landscape — new developments

Emphasising the positive

In many ways this perspective is closely allied with the preventative wellbeing agenda we touched on earlier. It recognises that workplaces can have their own negative impact on employee wellbeing. If the physical or psychological environment is unhealthy, if unsupportive or uncommunicative management styles proliferate, if working conditions are poor or employees don’t have access to the tools or training needed to deliver their best, then wellbeing will suffer. As another bank wellbeing lead succinctly put it: “As well as having the right wellbeing programmes in place we need to be ensuring that the bank doesn’t make you unwell. We need to be looking at ways of ensuring that the ways the bank operates and conducts itself, contributes to more positive wellbeing at work. It needs to be a net promoter of wellbeing not just a mitigator of health risk”.

Improve the work environment

Several UK banks have already embraced this thinking but the shift extends well beyond financial services — it’s becoming a hallmark of more mature wellbeing strategies across all sectors. A recent study on the effectiveness of wellbeing interventions that target individual employees, concluded that to maximise impact, employers would be better off tackling the kinds of workplace conditions referred to above. Dr William Fleming, Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre and the author of the study, summed it up well.

Further benefits are likely to follow when this approach is applied. By addressing institutional factors that undermine health, employers will also ease the burden on services, like Occupational Health, HR and EAPs, that typically pick up the pieces when things go off the rails for individuals.

2. Financial wellbeing

Financial wellbeing remains a major priority for most banks, which is hardly surprising. Since CPI inflation fell from its 11.1% peak in October 2022 to around 3.0% at the start of 2026, references to the cost-of-living crisis have all but disappeared from government and media narratives. But while the fall in headline inflation is clearly welcome, the day-to-day reality for most employees has barely altered. Prices for many of life’s essentials remain at levels far above where they stood two or three years ago, comfortably outstripping wage growth over the same period. In consequence, many continue to struggle. Financial wellbeing remains the top workplace support priority for 59% of employees.

Yet as recently as 2017, financial wellbeing featured minimally in workplace wellbeing strategies. with only a small minority of businesses prioritising it. Today it is seen as fundamental and with international conflict likely to stoke inflation and precipitate another surge in fuel costs, money worries are set to remain the most powerful influence on employee wellbeing for the foreseeable future.

Financial wellbeing in banks

Banks have been especially strong in this area providing seminars to educate employees in financial awareness and to help them build sound money management skills. Some provide digital tools to help with budgeting and one bank provides financial advice through an in-house team. Banks like NatWest and HSBC have gone further than most making financial wellbeing a central plank of their wellbeing offering.

3. Psychological safety

Over the last two years psychological safety has established itself as a key workplace wellbeing and business concern. This ought not to be surprising: it sits at the intersection of several critical workplace imperatives including mental health, inclusion, innovation and AI-driven change, creating a natural confluence of interest for employees and employers alike. Psychological safety has also been associated with creativity, information sharing, higher work engagement and good citizenship behaviours.

In the workplace, levels of psychological safety determine how able employees feel to challenge assumptions, to pose questions, to take calculated risks or voice concerns about ideas they see as misplaced — all behaviours that a healthy organisational culture actively encourages. Regrettably such openness whether at an organisational or departmental level, isn’t always in evidence.

In our work with banks supporting their wellbeing agendas over this period, psychological safety has been the most frequently requested webinar topic, reflecting its growing relevance. Influential recent findings have further accelerated its rise. The 2025 Randstad Workmonitor report revealed a striking erosion of workplace authenticity that may well have served as a wake-up call for employers.

Psychological safety during times of change

The scale of transformation now underway, not just in banks but across all economic sectors, as AI becomes the bedrock of new business models, means the continued importance of psychological safety as a wellbeing priority is all but assured. It is desirable in any context but especially so during times of upheaval, when employees need to feel able to ask awkward questions without fear of repercussions.

Recent research has shed light on another reason why it matters in times of uncertainty.

Significantly, Gartner found that where managers have been able to create a psychologically safe environment, it can bring about a 54% reduction in change fatigue — a powerful argument for embedding psychological safety into change management practice.

4. Can wellbeing go too far?

As part of the research process for this report, we held wide-ranging discussions with bank wellbeing leads about their priorities and how far workplace wellbeing should extend. These conversations revealed some interesting differences of opinion, which is unsurprising given the variety of approaches we see in banks’ wellbeing strategies.

When is enough wellbeing?

One area of debate related to how employee wellbeing offers had broadened out over the last five years to encompass an extraordinary range of programmes, including the provision of services previously delivered by the NHS. One wellbeing lead cited how issues like addictions, domestic abuse, loneliness and fertility treatment had been incorporated into wellbeing strategies. They felt this process may be going too far, too quickly; that personal and work boundaries are at risk of eroding. In their view, if every aspect of personal wellbeing is deemed in scope, it becomes harder to draw a line: “At what point do we say – enough?”

Workplace impact

Another wellbeing lead took a different view and didn’t see this as problematic. They argued that it isn’t the employer’s role to become an encyclopaedia for every health concern but that where an issue clearly affects employees’ ability to be present, productive and safe at work, it is legitimate — and often necessary — for it to feature within the wellbeing offer.

This more conditional view aligns with emerging practice in many organisations, which prioritise issues with clear links to attendance, performance, safety, inclusion or regulatory risk. It also reflects a broader shift in public policy and research, which increasingly frames wellbeing as a shared responsibility between individuals, employers, health systems and the state, rather than a purely private matter.

5. Loneliness

Social wellbeing has been recognised as an important component of workplace wellbeing strategies for many years but in most organisations close inspection revealed little of substance. Yes, it featured as a pillar in wellbeing strategies but in terms of resource allocation it has long been the poor relation of the other areas of wellbeing; physical and mental health and more recently of financial wellbeing. The reality is that whilst most businesses acknowledged its importance to an individual’s overall wellbeing, few knew how to address it properly in the workplace.

Covid-19 changed all that. The successive lockdowns revealed just how vital social connection is to our health and wellbeing. And many attribute the huge surge in mental health problems during the pandemic to the breakdown in social connection brought about by prolonged periods of isolation.

Who is affected

Loneliness is a social problem historically associated in most people’s minds with the elderly, particularly those living alone or with poor mobility. Recent research has shown those assumptions to be misplaced. It turns out it’s the younger demographics, those between the ages of 18-24 that are most heavily affected. The reasons for such a high incidence of loneliness among this age group is still being investigated but a likely contributor is the reduction in in-person interactions this age group experienced when social media and digital technology became the main channels for social communication.

The Government intervenes

Loneliness has been recognised as a societal problem for well over a decade. Indeed, in 2018 Theresa May’s government created a Minister for Loneliness, Tracey Crouch, to spearhead a cross-government response. Only more recently has it been identified as a specifically workplace concern. In 2021 the government produced a report, Employers and Loneliness. It estimated the cost of loneliness to UK employers at £2.5 billion a year and called upon employers to do more to combat loneliness and create a culture of openness and connectedness.

It has taken time, but businesses have begun to respond. In an era of remote and hybrid working, employers have sought to strengthen their approach to social wellbeing, particularly among employees working remotely, with measures such as:

• Regular check-ins
• Virtual team-building activities
• Opportunities for informal interactions that build genuine social bonds

Banks and loneliness

In the banking sector we see wellbeing interventions that whilst not explicitly targeting loneliness, address social connection in meaningful ways. Many banks encourage voluntary activity which creates social good but also brings together employees from different areas of the business and boosts social connection. A Lloyds Banking Group employee captured this well whilst reflecting on volunteering with the Woodland Trust.

The NatWest activity challenge that features in the Innovative wellbeing initiatives section of the report, operates in similar fashion. Its primary goal is to build physical fitness, but it has several secondary aims, one of which is to foster social connection. Those secondary goals matter too — and are key to what makes it such a compelling initiative.

Nearly all UK banks now include social wellbeing or social connection as a pillar in their wellbeing strategies. Nevertheless, in banks as in other sectors it still tends to lag behind other pillars in terms of the depth of its reach. Many businesses are now focusing on workplace loneliness but there remains some way to go before we can say it has been addressed as a workplace wellbeing concern.

6. Inclusivity remains vital to wellbeing

In the last report we recognised that whilst each maintained their own clear and separate identities, the links between diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and wellbeing were strengthening. From what we’ve seen over the last two years that proximity has become closer still.

The DEI and wellbeing connection

Core to this increased connection is a desire to ensure that the wellbeing agenda takes account of the varying needs of different demographics within the workforce. The push for inclusivity in wellbeing remains key for many employee resource groups (ERGs) and employee networks but it’s also a major priority for wellbeing teams seeking to ensure the wellbeing agenda addresses the needs of the whole workforce.

The Lloyds Banking Group’s creation of an LGBTQ+ clinical pathway, features in the Innovative wellbeing initiatives section of the report. It is a perfect example of what can be achieved when wellbeing teams and ERG’s come together to push for an innovative outcome that addresses the unmet needs of a particular workplace demographic.

A connection between DEI and wellbeing agendas is natural.

DEI networks make a major wellbeing contribution in their own right, as a source of community and mutual support for different workplace demographics. In many businesses they are one of the key elements in addressing the social wellbeing agenda. That is recognised at PwC whose wellbeing programme “Be Well, Work Well” explicitly links the employee network infrastructure into the wellbeing offer. Connections Groups are available through the company’s people networks, “enabling our people to connect and support one another through shared lived experiences.”

Creating neuro-inclusive workplaces

A good example of a workplace demographic whose needs have come into sharper focus recently is neurodiverse employees. ERGs and networks had a role to play here too, and significantly as a result of their encouragement, far more attention is now being paid to ways that workplaces can become more supportive of neurodiverse needs.

Lloyds Banking Group is one bank that has done much to become neuro inclusive. The measures they’ve taken include group-wide training, the creation of a neurodiversity toolkit to support neurodiverse employees and line managers and running a series of neurodiversity events involving senior leaders to raise awareness across the bank. Perhaps most impressively the bank’s private medical cover was extended to cover diagnosis for neurodiverse conditions. This has been a great success with over 1,000 colleagues, partners and dependents accessing the service at a time when obtaining a diagnosis through the NHS can feel glacially slow.