Why employee wellbeing is becoming the broker’s biggest lever in the benefits conversation
By Guy Chennells, Chief Commercial Officer: Discovery Corporate and Employee Benefits
Employee benefits consultants know that their clients often find it hard to prioritise employee wellbeing products and initiatives. But wellbeing is not just an additional spend line item – it is the multiplier that makes every other HR and employee benefits investment more effective.
Every HR process, from performance management to engagement and reward, relies on the energy, health, and emotional capacity of employees. When people are mentally, physically, or financially unwell, these investments lose traction long before they reach the bottom line.
For brokers, this presents a meaningful opportunity: positioning wellbeing not as a cost, but as an efficiency tool that strengthens the overall HR strategy.
Discovery’s internal data shows just how interconnected these wellbeing pillars are. Physical, emotional, and financial health rarely exist in isolation. In our own workforce at Discovery, employees with BMIs above 27 take 51 percent more sick leave than those in the healthy range.
This is not about labelling individuals – BMI is simply a useful proxy for understanding broader health risk – so it shows that on average, general health has a profound impact on productivity.
The pattern is similar for mental wellbeing. Employees identified as high risk on standard assessments consistently record higher sick leave days. Importantly, when health improves, workplace outcomes improve too. Employees whose BMIs shift from out of range to healthy reduce their sick leave by nearly 20 percent. This demonstrates that targeted wellbeing interventions drive measurable operational improvements.
Organisations also do not need to support all employees equally. The Pareto principle applies strongly to wellbeing risk: around 80 percent of health-related cost and disruption comes from roughly 20 percent of employees. For advisers, this means the greatest returns come from targeted, data driven interventions rather than broad, generic campaigns.
One of the most impactful areas for targeted support is financial wellbeing, and specifically, chronic debt. Debt stress is often the silent saboteur of employee performance. Advisers know the pattern well: employees under financial strain withdraw from the two-pot system, take on high interest credit, or resign simply to access their retirement savings.
These actions offer short-term relief but create substantial long-term harm. Employers, meanwhile, face higher turnover and lower engagement.
When these behaviours change, they generate real financial value across the benefits ecosystem. Avoiding a two-pot withdrawal eliminates fees, preserves retirement savings, and protects compound growth. That value can then be returned to the employee as an incentive.
This is the foundation of Discovery’s Debt Reset model. Built on behavioural economics, it shifts the focus from temporary bailouts to sustained behavioural change. Employees can pause their retirement contributions for up to twelve months and redirect those funds toward settling debt, up to a maximum of R25 000.
For many, this provides the first realistic pathway out of persistent indebtedness. The behavioural shift is reinforced when the paused contributions are later paid back into the member’s retirement boost fund as an incentive using the fees saved from the avoided withdrawals.
Critically, the intervention requires no additional employer funding. It simply unlocks and reallocates value already present within the retirement system.
For advisers, this presents a compelling value proposition: a benefit that improves employee financial stability, reduces debt stress and protects retirement outcomes – all without increasing employer cost.
More broadly, both the Debt Reset case study and our health data example illustrate a powerful truth: advisers do not always need new money to deliver better outcomes. They need better targeting, stronger behavioural design, and more effective use of the benefits already available.
In fact, our spend on wellbeing has not increased once in four years. Yet our targeted, data-led approach continues to deliver improved behaviour.
For brokers and advisers whose clients operate in a tight economic environment, the message is clear. Wellbeing is not an add‑on.
It is a strategic lever that amplifies the value of every rand that employers already invest in their people – and a meaningful differentiator in the employee benefits conversation.
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