In every senior role either of us has held, the pattern was the same.
Finance had detailed models. Operations had throughput data, cycle times, variance analysis. Supply chain had real-time visibility into every node. Marketing had attribution, conversion rates, channel performance broken down to the last penny.
And then you looked at the people function - the largest cost line in the business, typically 60-70% of total operating expenditure - and the data available was essentially this: were they in work today, or were they not.
Absence. That was it. The most sophisticated metric available for managing the organisation's most valuable and most expensive asset was whether someone had called in sick.
We built Parachute because we believed that was not good enough. And because we had come to understand that the gap was not just an inconvenience - it was costing organisations far more than anyone had quantified.
The cost hiding in plain sight
A study authored by Loeppke and Hymel - drawing on data from over 51,000 employees across ten US employers and published in Moser's Effective Management of Health and Safety Programs - identified something that should change how every organisation thinks about this.
The costs most finance and HR teams can see - medical claims, pharmacy costs, occupational health spend - represent just 30% of the total financial burden of poor workforce health. The other 70% is invisible: presenteeism, absenteeism, turnover, the slow drag of a workforce operating below capacity¹.
Not a marginal rounding error. The dominant cost. And it appears on no management report.
In UK terms: CIPD 2024 data puts average absence at 9.4 days per employee per year². But absence is only the visible tip. Presenteeism - people at their desks but not fully productive - consistently costs more than absence alone. Add turnover, with replacement costs running at approximately three months salary per leaver, and the total burden for a 1,000-person organisation typically exceeds £6.6 million a year.
That figure does not appear on any cost report in that organisation. It is not tracked. Not benchmarked. And because it is not measured, it is not managed.
The programmes are not the problem
This is the part we want to be direct about - because it matters.
The employee health and wellbeing industry in the UK is full of providers doing vitally important work. EAP programmes support people through real crises. Private medical insurance gets people treated faster. Occupational health services manage complex cases with real clinical skill. Mental health platforms are reaching people who would otherwise have nowhere to turn.
These are not the problem. They are essential. And the organisations investing in them are doing the right thing.
The challenge is structural rather than critical: these programmes are designed to treat symptoms and support people once a need has been identified. That is precisely what they should do. What is often missing is the diagnosis of the upstream conditions generating that need in the first place - the work design, management practices, and organisational factors that sit beneath the visible health demand and drive it forward.
These upstream causes are rarely within the scope of what health and benefits providers were built to address. That is not a criticism - it simply reflects what these services were designed to do.
Why measurement is not a feature - it is the foundation
Here is what makes the Loeppke and Hymel research genuinely important: it was not just the scale of the cost that surprised employers. It was where the cost actually sat.
When organisations could see the full picture, the conditions driving the greatest total workforce cost were not the same as those consuming the largest share of medical budgets. Depression, anxiety and musculoskeletal conditions - which may barely register in healthcare claims - consistently emerged as the leading drivers of productivity loss. Employers were directing resources at the wrong problems. Not through negligence. Because they were working from an incomplete picture.
This is why measurement is the foundation, not a feature, of human capital investment. It is not simply about knowing the size of the problem. It is about knowing where it is concentrated, what is driving it, and where investment will generate the greatest return.
Without that picture, even well-designed programmes are an educated guess.
The return is real - when investment is informed
The evidence on returns, when investment is targeted, is compelling.
Deloitte's analysis of mental health interventions in UK employers found an average return of £4.70 for every £1 invested³. EAP sector data covering seven million UK employees found average returns of £8 per £1⁴. These are not small numbers.
But what distinguished the programmes that produced those returns? Consistently, the organisations involved understood their specific problem before they started spending. They knew which conditions were driving capacity loss in their workforce. They invested accordingly.
Broad, undifferentiated wellbeing spending produces inconsistent results. Targeted investment - informed by a precise diagnosis of what is driving capacity loss in a specific workforce - produces reliable and significant returns.
The difference is not the size of the budget. It is the quality of the intelligence.
Human capital deserves a balance sheet
Financial capital is managed with discipline because organisations can see it clearly. Human capital has historically been managed with far less rigour because the measurement infrastructure has not existed.
Until recently, that was a reasonable position. It is no longer.
We believe workforce productivity is a system output - not a product of individual effort or isolated intervention, but the result of how work is designed, how it is managed, the health infrastructure surrounding it, and the state of the people working within it. When you can see all of those layers clearly, you can understand not just what capacity loss is costing you, but why - and where targeted action will actually move the number.
Most organisations are stuck in one of two positions. The first is the firefighting loop - reacting to absence spikes, turnover crises and engagement drops as they surface, treating each as an isolated event. The second is the containment loop - deploying benefits and programmes to manage damage already underway. Both loops are necessary. Neither addresses the upstream conditions that are generating the cost in the first place.
Measurement is what makes the difference. Not measurement as a one-off exercise but as an ongoing intelligence capability - the kind that tells leadership which conditions are driving loss in their specific organisation, which teams carry the highest risk, and where targeted investment will move the number.
The Keep Britain Working Review, published in November 2025, named the absence of robust workforce health data as a foundational barrier to change⁵. This is now a national priority, not just an organisational one.
One more thing worth saying directly: Parachute has no products to sell and no interventions to recommend. No commercial interest in the outcome beyond the accuracy of what we find. The diagnostic tells you what is true about your workforce. What you do with it is entirely your decision.
The organisations that invest in measurement now will have the evidence, the benchmarks, and the track record that others will eventually be required to build.
The balance sheet for your people exists. The question is whether you are using it.
Build your organisation's model in 48 hours
For a 1,000-person organisation, the estimated annual cost of workforce capacity loss is £6.6m. Parachute will build the financial model for your organisation in 48 hours - at no cost and with no commitment required.
Sources
Loeppke R & Hymel P. 'Health and Productivity Enhancement.' In Hegmann, Hughes & Moser (Eds.), Moser's Effective Management of Health and Safety Programs: A Practical Guide (4th ed.). OEM Press, 2023.
CIPD. Health and Wellbeing at Work Survey. 2024.
Deloitte UK. Mental Health and Employers: The Case for Investment (4th edition). May 2024.
Keep Britain Working. Final Report. November 2025. gov.uk
EAPA UK. Financial Return on EAPs 2022. Employee Assistance Professionals Association, January 2022