ROI of A Healthy Organisation: Hyper-Personalised, Proactive, Beyond HR

A company’s growth is only as strong as the health of its people. Today, burnout, absenteeism, disengagement, and stress don’t just affect morale, they carry a measurable business cost. Post-Covid, many organisations have made wellness a priority, moving beyond traditional HR benefits to more holistic approaches. But is this shift truly moving the needle? What challenges are business and HR leaders facing in adopting wellness at scale?

At the recent webinar “The ROI of Healthy Habits: Why Daily Wellness Can Be an Organisation's Best Kept Secret” hosted by People Matters, Jitin Bhasin, Founder and CEO, SaveIN, Abhishek Mehrotra CHRO, YUBI, and Purna Mahidhara, Altimetrik, explored what the future of workplace wellbeing might look like when it becomes hyper-personalised, proactive, and a driver of ROI.

The pandemic just didn’t disrupt how we work, it refined how we view health itself. For corporate India, COVID-19 was less of a crisis and more of a wake-up call. As Jitin Bhasin, Founder & CEO, SaveIN, puts it, “COVID was a tectonic event. It was an inflection point where people understood the cost of preventive care, the cost of being healthy rather than finding yourself confined to a hospital bed.” Until recently, most organisations considered hospitalisation cover to be the cornerstone of employee wellness. However, as Bhasin observes,  a big shift is happening wherein companies that were comfortable with traditional schemes like ‘hospitalisation covers’ as part of their employee wellness programs are now prioritising other aspects like personal care, wellness, preventive care, diet, and mental health of employees. 

This perspective has also reframed wellness as a driver of productivity. “Having the best diet possible to ensure that you can discover your best self, like today people want to prioritise how good they're looking, because it may have a direct impact on their mental state and therefore productivity at work,” said Jitin. Bhasin also noted that wellness has shifted from lifespan to health span. If earlier we were tracking lifespan, today, we want to know the years we are our productive best. 

Yet despite the growing awareness, adoption remains uneven. Even today, research shows that only one in five Indian corporates offers hospital insurance.  Still, within those numbers lies a clear trend, organisations are beginning to treat wellness as a business strategy, not just an HR benefit.

Bhasin distills it simply, “It's holistic care, not just wellness programs, but it's also what you eat, how you look, how you feel, that ultimately leads to you being productive at work”. 

Despite this progress, Abhishek Mehrotra CHRO, YUBI, argues that the biggest gap today is the lack of personalisation in corporate wellness approaches.

“What a 40 year old with a family and an aging parents would need, versus a 27 year old person who's going to walk into the workforce out of college is very, very different. So whether it is the insurance or the benefits, the audience is different, and personalization is not there. So I think this is one of the biggest pieces that I see still has a lot of room to improve.”

With multiple generations working side by side, the same insurance plans or engagement activities don’t serve everyone equally. This one-size-fits-all approach often fails to resonate.

Abhishek suggests undertaking incremental improvements rather than a one-shot big bank goal. With different genres of people, there is a need to accommodate diversity of approach. And this requires a people-first, employee-driven approach rather than HR or leadership-driven one. The idea is to create diverse platforms across physical health, mental health, and engagement, and see which one thrives.  

Jitin agrees and adds that personalization is essential for take-up rates within the organisation. He says that it is important to list events where organisations can influence outcomes for an employee or their family members. Thus, creating a personalized experience in the form of mobile apps, for instance, can help set up doctor consultations or diet plans for employees. Making these facilities and services available in a personalized, discrete, private, and comfortable ecosystem is extremely impactful, with pronounced benefits. 

AI can help in hyper-personalization by learning from usage patterns, sentiment data, wherein employees can build their own wellness journey, and companies can aid it by allocating funds customized to employees’ needs. Although there is also a need for HR leaders to build awareness amongst employees, and to know how to use it right. 

At the same time, Abhishek suggests that every organisation needs to define wellness for themselves, especially in terms of investment. 

“See, every organisation will be limited by budgets - need to prioritize what works for you as an organisation - not only the ROI, but also the VOI. VOI means value on the investment. Do people really value the insurance plan that you're giving? Do people really value the benefit of a gym membership? What is the VOI of the benefits, or the initiatives that you are driving?”

According to Jitin, these days employers are trying to optimize the allocation of budget, beyond traditional events like hospitalization, and creating occasions for employees to experience wellness other than that. This allocation of smart money is where the return on investment, or value on investment, is, because only via value-addedness, people can be impacted. 

One such approach is ERCs (Employee Resource Communities)—small groups united by shared wellness goals. High participation, especially from first-timers, signals strong adoption.

Purna Mahidhara, Head of People Operations at Altimetrik, emphasizes that wellness should not be treated as a one-off program, but rather built into daily habits. Companies that make wellness inclusive and part of everyday life are already seeing productivity gains.

Jitin mentions how, taking this into context, they are working on an AI-based face scanner, wherein AI can scan one’s face and tell stress levels, measure blood pressure, and oxygen levels, for example. This can encourage people to do preventive checkups. Similarly, fostering cultures of fitness, through gyms or other physical activities, can significantly reduce long-term disease risks.

But there is one aspect of implementation that majorly needs to be taken into consideration is that these holistic wellness measures cannot be a mere HR tool but what Abhishek calls “ a way of life”. Once it becomes a need or a pull, people will automatically adopt.

“Wellness should not be a checkbox. This should be a must-have in organisations, and people should treat this as a proactive approach instead of a reactive one. That's a shift we want. We want wellness to be embedded into everyday work, instead of that being a tick mark at the end of the year,” adds Purna.

Looking ahead, Abhishek says that the future is of hyper-personalization and technology that gives choices to employees to decide how they want to consume the wellness packages or programs.  With AI, predictive healthcare is more prominent than ever, impacting the proactive wellness ecosystem in a major way. 

Also, flexible payment plans for items not covered by insurance, Jitin feels, will be a big part.