Half your workforce cannot afford the support you are paying for
There is a specific way a well-funded wellbeing program fails, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the program.
TELUS Health asked Australian workers what would stop them getting mental health support. Half named cost or affordability - the most cited barrier by a wide margin.
The same research puts a productivity figure against it. Workers who named a barrier of that kind lose 40.0 workdays a year, against 23.7 for workers who report no barriers at all. TELUS Health, Mental Health Index Australia, Q1 2026, fieldwork February to March 2026, n=1,000. TELUS sells workplace wellbeing and EAP services, so say so when you cite them, and note that subgroup bases are not published separately.
Read that as an employer and the shape of the problem changes.
The loop
An organisation identifies that its people need mental health support. It funds provision. The provision exists, is decent, and is available.
A significant proportion of the workforce then does not use it, because they cannot afford the part the organisation does not cover, or because they believe they cannot, or because the sessions run out at a point where the need does not.
Their situation does not improve. The productivity gap widens. The organisation looks at low utilisation and reads it as low need.
Nothing in that sequence is anyone’s mistake. It is a design that assumes the barrier is awareness or stigma, running into a barrier that is arithmetic.
And awareness is doing worse than assumed too
Worth knowing alongside it: more than half of Australian workers - 55% - either do not know whether their employer offers an EAP, or say their employer does not offer one. TELUS Health, 2025 Mental Health Barometer - Australia, drawn from five quarterly waves of n=1,000.
That is awareness, not utilisation. The two get conflated constantly and they are different measures. But it means that before cost even enters the picture, half the workforce is not in the conversation.
The gap employees name themselves
The most direct evidence sits in what employees say they want and are not getting.
In Gallagher’s Workplace Wellbeing Index: Financial Edition, financial education is the single largest gap between what employees rate as important and what they say is available to them: 56% against 35%, a twenty-one point gap. The next two largest gaps in the entire survey are also financial - financial management resources at 54% against 37%, and additional employer superannuation contributions at 64% against 48%.
Three largest gaps in the survey. All three about money.
Methodology matters here: 3,598 employees across Australia and New Zealand, blended, no Australia-only split published, fieldwork December 2025 to January 2026. Gallagher sells workplace financial wellbeing and benefits programs and the report closes with an offer of help, which you should factor in. But this is employee-reported importance against employee-reported availability, which is a fair instrument for the question being asked.
What follows
This is not an argument that anyone’s wellbeing program is wrong. It is an argument about where the constraint sits.
An Oxford study of more than 46,000 employees across 233 organisations found individual-level workplace wellbeing interventions produced no measurable improvement in psychological wellbeing (Fleming, 2024, Industrial Relations Journal). That finding is not a criticism of any organisation’s choices. Structural drivers require structural responses, and if a material share of the constraint is financial, then an individual-level remedy was aimed at a different layer however well it was chosen and run.
So the practical question is not whether to keep the program. Keep it.
The question is whether anyone has checked what is standing between your people and the support you have already bought. If cost is a live barrier for a substantial share of your workforce, then the marginal dollar buys more by removing the barrier than by extending the provision - and that is a reward and benefits decision as much as a wellbeing one.
Three things worth knowing before your next renewal. What proportion of your workforce knows the support exists. What proportion could use it without an out-of-pocket cost. And whether anyone has ever asked them either question.
The full picture, with its limits stated
The Hidden Patterns Beneath Performance is my research brief on financial pressure as a driver of psychosocial risk. Every figure carries its source, sample size and fieldwork date, and the paper is explicit about what the evidence does not yet support.
