Most employers are not indifferent to their people's health. Far from it. Benefits budgets have grown. Wellbeing has become a boardroom conversation. And yet, across organisations of every size and sector, the same patterns keep emerging. Good people struggling in silence. Experienced employees leaving for reasons that could have been prevented. Absence figures that don't tell the full story.
The problem is not intent. The problem is that the way most organisations think about employee health has not kept pace with what employees are going through.
For decades, workplace health has been framed around acute illness and crisis intervention. Someone gets sick, they take time off, they return. Someone reaches breaking point, they call the EAP. The system is reactive by design, built to respond to visible problems rather than prevent invisible ones.
But the health challenges that most affect working people are not acute crises. They are sustained, often invisible, and deeply personal. They are the kind of conditions and life transitions that unfold over months and years, in the background of a busy career, often without a diagnosis, often without acknowledgement, almost always without adequate support.
And when those experiences go unsupported, the costs accumulate quietly. Not as dramatic exits or sudden absences, but as gradual disengagement, reduced performance, eroded loyalty and, eventually, departures that organisations rarely connect back to their root cause.
Conditions affecting women's reproductive and hormonal health are remarkably prevalent and remarkably underserved. Endometriosis affects around 1 in 10 women of reproductive age. PMOS affects a similar proportion. Severe PMS, chronic pelvic pain, fibroids, UTIs and a range of gynaecological conditions collectively affect a significant share of the female workforce at any given time.
The average time to an endometriosis diagnosis in the UK is still 7 to 10 years. That is a decade of managing symptoms that can be debilitating, without clinical validation, often while maintaining a full working life. Period pain alone causes absence for 23% of women in any six-month period, and that figure captures only what is reported and visible.
What it does not capture is the far larger toll of presenteeism. Showing up, but not fully functioning. Pushing through pain or exhaustion or anxiety in meetings, on calls, in high-stakes moments, because there is no other option and no framework at work to acknowledge what is happening.
The conversation about men's health at work has been slow to develop, but the data is clear. Men are significantly less likely than women to seek medical help, more likely to delay acting on symptoms and more likely to suffer in silence when it comes to both physical and mental health.
Around 40% of men have low testosterone, a condition that affects energy, mood, concentration and physical resilience. Most of them do not know it. They attribute the symptoms to stress, age, overwork, or simply assume it is how they are supposed to feel.
The reluctance to seek help is not weakness. It is the product of deeply ingrained cultural expectations that workplaces have been slow to challenge. Standard benefits rarely meet men where they are. A confidential, specialist space designed specifically for men's health concerns changes the dynamic entirely.
Few workplace health topics carry the emotional weight of fertility. The experience of trying to conceive, navigating treatment and managing loss is profoundly personal and profoundly demanding. And it happens almost entirely in private, while people continue to show up and perform at work.
1 in 6 couples globally experience infertility. The process of fertility treatment involves medical appointments, hormonal interventions, significant physical side effects and repeated cycles of hope and disappointment. 90% of people going through fertility challenges report feeling depressed. The impact on focus, energy and resilience at work is substantial.
88% of employees say they would change jobs for fertility support. That figure reflects how much people value being seen and supported through this experience, and how significant the retention risk is for organisations that do not offer it.
The transition to parenthood is one of the most significant of a person's life, and one of the most under-supported in the workplace. The healthcare system provides some scaffolding, but it is often fragmented, time-limited and focused on the clinical rather than the holistic.
1 in 5 women develop a mental health problem during the perinatal period. Postnatal depression affects around 1 in 10 fathers too, a dimension of new parent health that receives very little attention in workplace wellbeing conversations. The physical recovery from birth, the demands of infant feeding, the sleep deprivation, the identity shift and the transition back to work are all significant challenges that most organisations leave employees to navigate largely alone.
The consequences are measurable. 17% of women leave employment within five years of childbirth. The return-to-work moment is often the point at which the decision is a steep price.
Menopause most commonly affects people between the ages of 45 and 55, which means it directly impacts some of the most experienced and senior members of many organisations. The symptoms, including brain fog, insomnia, anxiety, joint pain, mood disruption and fatigue, can significantly affect daily functioning.
1 in 4 women consider leaving work because of menopause. 1 in 10 do.
The scale of that attrition, concentrated among experienced, often senior employees, represents a significant and largely preventable loss of capability and institutional knowledge. With the right specialist support, severe menopause symptoms can reduce by 58% within 180 days. Menopause-related work impairment drops by 15% within 90 days. The intervention works. It simply needs to exist.
There is a thread that runs through every one of these health experiences, and it is one that benefits packages almost never address in a joined-up way.
Nutrition, physical activity, sleep and mental wellbeing are not lifestyle choices that sit separately from clinical health. They are clinical factors that directly influence outcomes across every condition and life stage described above.
The woman managing PCOS will have meaningfully better outcomes with nutritional guidance tailored to hormonal health. The man with low testosterone who addresses his sleep, exercise habits and stress levels may see significant clinical improvement alongside any other intervention. The person going through IVF who has access to mental health support and evidence-based nutrition guidance is better equipped for the physical and emotional demands of treatment. The new parent needs sustained physical and nutritional support during recovery, not just a discharge appointment.
Menopause is not managed by HRT alone. It involves bone density, cardiovascular health, weight distribution, stress response, sleep architecture and diet, all of which are influenced by lifestyle factors that specialist support can address.
Neurodiversity adds another layer of complexity that intersects with all of the above. Neurodivergent employees often experience hormonal changes, life transitions and healthcare systems very differently. ADHD in women, for example, is frequently undiagnosed for years and research increasingly shows that symptoms can worsen significantly during perimenopause. Supporting neurodivergent employees through any health journey requires clinicians who understand that intersection, not services that treat each thing in isolation.
Lifestyle healthcare is not a supplement to specialist clinical care. It is the foundation that makes it work.
Most benefits packages are built as a collection of independent services rather than an integrated system. A mental health app. An EAP. A private GP. A gym allowance. Each serves a purpose, but none of them connect. None of them are designed around the specific clinical expertise required to support someone through perimenopause, or fertility treatment, or the postnatal period, or a men's health concern they have never said out loud to anyone.
The result is a system with significant gaps, and those gaps are exactly where the most complex and sustained health challenges fall.
Employees do not experience their health in neat categories. A woman managing endometriosis who then goes through fertility treatment and then pregnancy and then the early return to work has moved through multiple connected health experiences over several years. Each one affects the next. The support she needs is joined up, specialist and ongoing. A fragmented benefits package cannot provide that.
The organisations seeing the best outcomes, in retention, absence, engagement and performance, are not necessarily the ones with the largest benefits budgets. They are the ones that have rethought what employee health support is for.
They have moved from reactive to proactive. From generic to specialist. From siloed to joined up. And they have started paying attention to the health experiences that were always there but never acknowledged: the fertility journeys, the hormonal conditions, the men quietly struggling, the new parents not coping, the senior women considering whether it is all worth it anymore.
Supporting people through these moments is not a statement about values, though it is that too. It is a practical business decision with measurable outcomes.
Because the cost of not supporting people is not hypothetical. It shows up in absence data. It shows up in exit interviews. It shows up in the productivity of people who are present in body but absent in everything else. And it shows up, most expensively, in the loss of people who should never have left.
The question for HR and benefits leaders is not whether these health experiences are affecting their workforce. They are, without question. The question is whether the organisation has created the conditions for people to get the support they need, or whether it is leaving people to manage alone and hoping for the best.
Closing that gap requires healthcare that is specialist, that is proactive, that treats the whole person rather than individual symptoms, and that is genuinely accessible in the moments when people most need it.
That is a higher bar than most current benefits packages meet. But it is the bar that the workforce increasingly needs its employers to clear.
Peppy gives employees unlimited, confidential access to specialist clinicians across women's health, men's health, fertility, pregnancy and parenthood, and menopause, with lifestyle healthcare woven through every service. Trusted by 250+ employers and supporting over 3 million employees worldwide.