New weight loss drugs, AI-driven neurodiversity support and health coaching are just some of the key trends that will drive a more proactive approach to wellbeing in 2025.
3,000 people a day now being assessed as unfit to work, in no small part due to underlying health conditions and soaring mental health issues. This means the emphasis for 2025 is set to become even more about prevention than cure and driving healthy habits.
Weight loss drugs and behaviour change
With one in four adults now classed as obese, the decision by the NHS to roll out weight loss drugs poses an interesting dilemma for employers. In particular, whether they can really prevent obesity related conditions, such as chronic heart disease and cancer.
As medical advisors and charities have warned, even though weight loss drugs have been proven to help people lose 5-10% of their body weight in as little as six weeks, they are not a silver bullet and do not come without risk. Not only has a UK death been linked to weight loss drugs, due to organ side effects, but people can easily regain weight if underlying issues aren’t addressed.
Wight loss drugs are therefore best viewed as a sticking plaster. They could prove a valuable tool for dealing with an MSK issue due to weight gain after an operation, but you wouldn’t use a sticking paster for a wound that needs stitches, such as a traumatic experience driving consumption of food as a maladaptive coping strategy.
All of which means employers will also have to consider wider issues, such as making it easier for employees to access healthy food to educating employees how to make healthy choices on a budget. Construction company, EKFB has achieved success in this area by educating workers living in separate digs away from home how to batch cook healthy food, as part of a ‘one small change’ initiative designed to improve blood pressure and cholesterol.
AI driven wellbeing and neurodiversity support
The ultimate goal of wellbeing programmes has long been to prevent employees from getting sick in the first place, however, generic wellbeing advice has often failed to deliver. Not only will generic communications about smoking cessation or menopause be irrelevant to most people who receive them, but generic advice doesn’t appeal to everyone’s motivators.
Much greater use of AI in 2025 means it will soon be possible to automatically send incredibly bespoke and personalised wellbeing communications to individuals. Whether this is using data about the individual, gathered from wearable tech monitoring their stress, sleep and energy levels, or generative chat tools that ask the individual what they need help with.
AI driven insights are anticipated to become particularly important for provoking behaviour change. We all know we should be eating less processed food and exercising more, but it’s all a bit meaningless until someone gets told: ‘Based on your personal data, if you carry on as you are you will develop diabetes or heart issues in the next few years. Here are some healthy habits based on your interests that you can take up now to help prevent that from happening.’
Emerging technology also has great potential for supporting neurodiverse individuals however it must be used with caution. For example, AI tools that can make suggestions for the wording of an email, generate an opening paragraph or advise on specific points to consider when writing a sales proposal are not without controversy.
Different tools have different merits in terms of enabling productivity, as well as challenges such as data integrity and data security across the AI platform. Critical to success will be engaging with occupational health professionals, who can provide compressive assessments focusing on key aspects of the job role, to ensure any solutions put in place genuinely remove the barriers a neurodivergent employee faces at work, rather than creating new barriers.
Health coaching and manager intervention
With access to the NHS restricted and health insurance premiums soaring, the trend towards focusing on preventative solutions, to keep people healthy, rather waiting until they become too sick to work is set to continue. A new trend for 2025 being the use of health coaching. Traditionally reserved for people who are at risk of failing workplace medicals, or have an underlying health condition, health coaching is set to be increasingly offered to any employee who wants to become healthier.
Critical to success will be utilising biopsychosocial models to consider at all the factors undermine an employee’s health, such as fear of pain making them more sedentary than they need to be, or lack of social interaction with others meaning they don’t have a reason to get out and about. To be successful, health coaching must look at the person in their entirety to support and motivate them to find a way back to true health.
Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to addressing the mental health issues that are the biggest issue undermining employee wellbeing, with thousands of people now being signed off as too sick to work due to mental health issues every week.
Mental health problems, such as feelings of depression or anxiety, are less likely to self-correct than physical issues, such as a sprained wrist or bad knee. So if the trend towards helping people before they become too sick to stay in work is to be effective, individuals must be helped to recover and signposted towards support, while they’re still in work.
This can sometimes be challenging for managers, who tend to wait until an individual has gone off sick before intervening. This means a final wellbeing trend for 2025 must be to encourage managers to have the ‘courageous conversations’ needed to help someone who is clearly struggling.
Critical to this is having clearly policies and support tools in place so that if an employee does open up about an issue managers know where to signpost them. That is if an AI chatbot doesn’t get there first.
