(Opinion) Is supporting employee wellness worth the cost?

Industry professionals report that employee wellness contributes to lower health costs, boosts productivity

Andrew Pelkey

 

Michael Young, Ph.D

The global management and consulting firm, McKinsey & Company’s 2020 report “Prioritizing health:

A prescription of prosperity,” cites their own and others’ research and argues that “one-third of economic growth in advanced economies in the past century could be attributed to improvements in the health of global populations” and that health has “contributed almost as much to income growth as education.”

The authors highlight as an example of impact on the workforce that globally “a total of 580 million person-years was lost to poor health among those aged 15 and 64 in 2017.” In her Dec. 9 NH Business Review article, Dr. Ana Stankovic argued similarly, though more locally, that by supporting better health of their employees, employers could “lower health costs and boost productivity.”

McKinsey & Company, as well as Dr. Stankovic, focus on physical health, and Maslow certainly put that at the base of his well-known hierarchy of needs. But what about mental health, wellness and behavioral health as a driver for productivity as well?

Recent broad-ranging research published in 2024 from established sources such as the World Health Organization and the National Alliance on Mental Illness supports the idea that mental health is critical to worker productivity and retention, and according to more local research, this may be the case for rural agricultural sectors as well.

UNH agricultural researcher Dr. Analena Bruce’s 2025 study on New England farm viability showed that, in addition to the more commonly understood issues of financial profitability, when New England farmers were asked directly they “also conceptualized farm viability as interrelated with social sustainability of the enterprise in terms of their own health and well-being.”

Based on farmers’ inputs, the authors assert that “a farm is not viable if farmers are not physically and emotionally able to maintain a farm enterprise over time.” It is the acknowledgement of the broader social realities of farm viability that has led UNH Extension to develop multiple farmer support networks, including the Farm Strong network that focused on famer mental health until it ran out of funding.

Funding and the cost of supporting mental health is certainly a major barrier to providing this kind of support — especially in more rural blue-collar industries. According to Andrew Pelkey, who is the current president of the NH Landscape Association (NHLA) and the owner of North Point Outdoors (NPO), a NH landscaping company, most small business owners simply do not feel they can afford to support their staff with basic health insurance, much less with additional wellness benefits.

This is part of the reason why NHLA has partnered with the National Automotive, Roads, and Fuel Association (NARFA) to develop an agreement where any member of NHLA has access to discounted group insurance plans through NARFA.

Of these benefits, Pelkey says that, as a business owner, he thinks access to Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) that support limited free counseling for employees or their families is one of the most valuable returns on investment for NPO.

Noting that the industries like landscaping may experience more than their fair share of drug and alcohol abuse issues, he has really appreciated having an “outlet to utilize that is not immediate termination.” Instead, NPO is able to offer a second chance to employees suffering from behavioral health issues on the contingency that the employee access EAP support.

Pelkey’s team has been able to use the EAP to provide second chances to those who could have been terminated who instead, with the help of the EAP program, were able to stay on the payroll and even advance to higher level positions.

NPO pairs access to supports like EAP with other employee programs that help to create a supportive and engaged workplace culture which, according to Pelkey, has been part of their 98% employee retention rate — something that he says saves the company a lot of money when one considers the costs of re-hiring and retraining key positions. Pelkey admits, though, that amidst the often “male-dominated bravado” mentality that dominates the industry, building a culture like this is not easy.

UNH Extension Specialist Andrew Fast, who focuses his work on supporting the timber industry, echoes this sentiment. While he perceives that there might be benefits to sawmills and loggers supporting employee wellness (such as a mill being able to minimize absenteeism to allow for efficient production), he has found the industry to be resistant to topics like mental health and well-being especially when they are introduced as such. He has found the topic to be almost “polarizing,” or perceived as “woke.”

According to Fast, many forest industry employers view missed work as a “work ethic” issue. These business owners have sharp pencils and are, by necessity, bottom-line driven. Fast emphasizes that, if there was convincing financial return-on-investment data, many of them would get on board: “They invest where they can make money.”

UNH Extension Specialist Lindsay Watkins, who works to support the NH arboriculture industry (i.e., tree care), believes that industry may have some of the same economic pain-points as the landscaping industry when it comes to worker well-being and the resulting costs due to absenteeism.

As the chair of the education committee for the New England International Society of Arboriculture, she has seen long-term workforce well-being as a topic that has gained some recent traction. Watkins also notes that there is likely an opportunity to use a focus on well-being to reduce harmful and expensive injuries and accidents.

Prior to Extension, Watkins worked for a tree care company that incorporated a well-being check-in as a component of each day’s job briefing and job safety analysis — and more crucially, cultivated a culture where crew members were supported when speaking up rather than being penalized.

The goal was to ensure that no one who might be mentally distracted would be put in a critical role at the job site. Lindsay found this seemingly minor change as a pragmatic shift in practice that not only built more effective, less-stigmatized communications on her team but also appeared to have a real impact on preventing accidents.

Other low-hanging fruit could be to offer low or no-cost programs such as those offered by UNH Extension: Mental Health First Aid or the shorter A.I.D. (Awareness. Interaction. Direction.) can help managers and employees support their co-workers by learning to recognize signs of mental health or substance misuse issues before they turn into crises. Living Well with Chronic Pain can help workers learn to manage pain in ways that allow them to remain active and avoid excessive use of pain medication.

Low-cost initiatives like job-site check-ins and Extension educational programs are viable ways to begin to build the kind of supportive and effective workplaces that can increase employee retention and limit absenteeism. That said, to truly move wellness forward in the “Live Free or Die” culture of industries with tight margins, it will be essential to increase (a) access to employer-provided health benefits that are affordable to the employer and employee, and (b) to identify legitimate return-on-investment metrics for wellness programming.

Michael Young, Ph.D., is the health and well-being program leader for UNH Cooperative Extension.