Is your HR team ready for the upcoming welfare reforms?
- Dr Lara Shemtob
- May 8
- 3 min read
With new government plans aiming to get more people with long-term ill health or disability into employment, the composition of workforces across the UK is about to change. If the initiative is successful, millions of individuals with long term ill health and disability will be moving into work, some entering the labour market for the first time.
This presents a significant opportunity for organisations. The untapped potential in this population is vast. But to harness it, workplaces must be prepared.
Table of Contents:
Here are four critical questions HR teams should be asking right now:
1. What is our current work and health offering?
The landscape of workplace health support is not equal across organisations. To simplify this, there are three main categories:
a) Comprehensive occupational health provision (either in-house or via an external provider)
b) Ad hoc access to expert input when issues arise
c) No formal provision or protocols in place
To be effective, even the most comprehensive setup needs to be understood and accessible. People at all levels of the organisation must know how, when and why to ask for help. Without this, even a gold-standard OH service is as good as having none at all.
Disclaimer token ‘wellbeing perks’ from massages to healthy cooking classes offer limited upsides in the absence of a comprehensive and evidence based work and health offering.
2. Do we 'get' work and health as an organisation?
From legal obligations to confidentiality, every employee—from leadership to line managers to new starters—needs a working understanding of work and health responsibilities.
At its most basic, this means knowing:
What help is available
When and how to ask for it
Why this is important
This culture of understanding must be actively embedded, not assumed.
3. Are we using the right touchpoints for work and health?
There are key moments in an employee’s journey where addressing work and health proactively makes a difference. Two examples are:
These are natural opportunities to understand how someone’s health may affect their work. Having these conversations at the right time can lead to simple but powerful changes. For example, offering hybrid work arrangements to a new starter with a long term condition to help them manage fluctuating symptoms. Or, identifying work-related causes of absence early and nipping the trigger factors in the bud.
4. Do we understand and respect employee confidentiality?
Managers often want to help—but there’s a limit to what employees will be comfortable sharing about their health directly, to their colleagues and seniors. This is understandable. Occupational Health (OH) professionals are trained to assess, advise, and hold sensitive information appropriately, feeding back only what is necessary for the workplace to know, with employee consent. Using OH helps strike the right balance between support, dialogue and privacy—ensuring the right people have the right information, at the right time.
In summary
The welfare reforms will change the makeup of recruitment pools and workforces across the UK. Organisations can thrive in this landscape by crystallising their understanding of work and health and within this, understanding when to lean on professional expertise.
Being prepared for success in this changing landscape means being ready to support and integrate people with diverse health needs, and HR must get up to speed in order to deliver on this.
Ready to prepare for success?
Insight Workplace Health can support your HR team to navigate these changes. Contact us here or call us on 01792 321010 to find out more about our Occupational Health services.
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