UK employers tend to fall short when it comes to having a defined health strategy plan for their employees, especially when the numbers are measured against mainland Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). Aon’s EMEA Health Survey Report, published in early 2016, revealed that only 30 percent of UK employers have a defined health strategy compared with 40 percent of EMEA employers, and that only 37% of UK employers understand the impact their employee health issues have on the workplace.

In particular, while 63 percent of UK employers believe that their top priority is managing stress and mental well-being, while 51 percent feel that physical health is their second-highest priority, yet 57 percent of employers have physical and social programs as part of their benefits package, and only 41 percent have any initiatives for improving mental health and well-being.

What also emerged was the fact that while 93 percent of UK employers agree that they need to shoulder the responsibility for influencing their employees’ approaches to health care and changing unhealthy behavior, they tend to waste expenditures on poorly-thought-out strategies when they should be using the power of big data to justify making those expenditures.

By utilizing data sets and analytics in order to identify risks and trends among their employee base, Matthew Lawrence, Chief Broking Officer, Health & Benefits UK and EMEA for Aon Employee Benefits says that employers can build “a foundation level of risk profiling [that] means informed and targeted decisions can be made around [a] future well-being strategy.”

The largest survey of its type, Aon queried 500 HR directors and risk managers from 22 countries across EMEA. The data collected points to areas that need improvement, such as increasing the uptake of health benefits to improve measurement of health care initiatives and maximizing the return on a firm’s investment in employee health.