Britain's Healthiest Workplace

What is Britain's Healthiest Workplace?

Britain’s Healthiest Workplace was established in 2013 in response to the fact that many UK employers are failing to adequately invest in the health and wellbeing of their staff. Health-related lost productivity is costing the UK economy an estimated £91 billion (Source: Britain's Healthiest Workplace 2019 Survey and ONS Data), which would reduce significantly with adequate investment in health and wellbeing.

Britain’s Healthiest Workplace aims to study the link between modifiable health risks and short-term productivity, develop a common understanding of what employee health and wellbeing means, and establish a common set of standards that can be applied to all industries. The survey uses a broad set of questions covering lifestyle, clinical and mental health, work engagement and productivity, and an in-depth assessment of leadership, culture and the health and wellbeing interventions offered by employers.

Our 2019 Winners

	Healthiest Workplace	Most Improved Workplace	Healthiest New Entrant
Large	Johnson & Johnson	Wrightington Wigan & Leigh NHS Foundation Trust	Arcadis UK (Holdings) Limited
Medium	adidas	Argos Financial Services	Taylor Wessing
Small	Wellness International Ltd	MPI Limited	BCS Consulting

The Benefits of Participating

Participating employers will gain not only a deeper understanding of the health risks affecting their employees, but also how these risks impact upon other factors such as job and life satisfaction, work engagement, and productivity. Participation spans a wide range of organisational sizes, sectors and regions, allowing for practical and relevant benchmarking against other comparable employers. The study also allows repeating employers to track their progress and the health of their employees over time, and offers recommendations for improvement.

Not only will participating employers receive an in-depth Organisational Health Report, detailing the health profile of their organisation, but employees completing the survey will receive a Personal Health Report, including information such as their Vitality Age, in real-time.

Since its inception in 2013, 510 organisations and over 181,000 employees have taken part in the study. Previous winners include organisations such as adidas, Nomura and Johnson & Johnson.

Advisory board

The initiative is overseen by an independent board of experts. Chaired by Dame Carol Black, it includes leading specialists in workplace wellness, public health and mental wellbeing. Some of the board includes:
- Professor Jenny Harries, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, England
- Professor Jeffery Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Stanford Graduate School of Business
- Professor Sara Singer, Professor of Medicine, Stanford School of Medicine
- Andrew Jack, Global Education Editor, The Financial Times
- Professor Andrew Curran, Chief Scientist, Health and Safety Executive
- Professor Theresa Marteau, Director of Behaviour and Health Research, Cambridge University

Academic partners

Analysis and research for Britain’s Healthiest Workplace is conducted by the University of Cambridge and RAND Europe. Our recent research has focused on understanding the modifiable drivers of productivity loss, and how different types of workplace wellness strategies can be used to reduce this loss.

Vitality Age

Britain’s Healthiest Workplace uses VitalityHealth’s Vitality Age measure to compare different types of organisations and employees over time. Vitality Age is a validated measure of a person’s ‘health’ age after adjusting for the impact of lifestyle behaviours and clinical indicators.