The four questions you will be asked when you take this to the exec
You are not walking in to win an argument. You are walking in to give somebody enough to approve.
Most good internal proposals die in the same ten minutes.
Not because the person across the table disagrees. Because they have to sign for it, they think in dollars, and nothing they have been handed lets them say yes without exposure. Approving something you cannot explain upward is a personal risk, and people do not take personal risks for a proposal that arrives as a conviction.
So the useful preparation is not a better argument. It is anticipating the four questions - and there are only four, and they are the same four everywhere.
1. How did you arrive at that number?
The first question is never about the size of the figure. It is about its provenance.
What kills a number in that room is not being too small. It is being unattributable. The moment you cannot say where a figure came from, when the fieldwork was done, and what population it describes, the whole proposal is reclassified as enthusiasm, and everything after that is politeness.
So bring the sources with the number, on the same page. Publisher, date, sample, scope. Include the vintage even when it is unhelpful. If your best available Australian figure is nine years old, say so out loud before anyone finds it - a figure you have already disclosed the weakness of is a figure you are still holding at the end of the meeting.
And be conservative deliberately. A smaller number you can defend beats a larger one you cannot, every time. The larger one gets challenged once and takes the proposal down with it.
2. Is this not the wellbeing spend we already approved?
This is the fairest question of the four and the one most proposals fumble, usually by attacking the existing program.
Do not. The person asking may well have funded it, championed it, or hired the person who runs it. It is also probably a decent program.
The answer is a layer, not a replacement. Existing wellbeing spend generally works on how people cope with pressure. What you are describing works on a driver of the pressure itself, which is a different level of the same problem. Both can be right.
Then put the two side by side per head, using your own numbers. Current wellbeing investment per employee per year against the modelled cost per employee per year of the thing that is not being addressed. That comparison does more work than any paragraph of explanation, because it moves the conversation from category to arithmetic.
3. Why now, and not next year?
Two honest answers, and neither of them is manufactured urgency, which this audience detects instantly.
The first is compounding. This is not a static cost sitting in a corner waiting to be picked up. Attrition triggers recruitment, recruitment triggers ramp time, unaddressed pressure produces the sick days and the errors and the decisions that get expensive later. Deferral is not neutral, and the twelve months of deferral is itself a cost you can put a figure against.
The second, in NSW, is that the standard changed on 1 July 2026. Approved codes of practice, including Managing psychosocial hazards at work, now carry a comply-or-justify status under section 26A of the WHS Act. Other jurisdictions are moving the same direction and have not arrived, so say so - overstating the regulatory position is the fastest way to lose the room you were trying to win.
4. And what does doing nothing cost?
This is the question that decides it, and it is the only one of the four most people cannot answer at all.
Note what it is really asking. Not what the initiative costs. What the current state costs, per year, if nobody does anything - because that is the number the proposed spend gets compared against, and without it there is nothing to compare against except zero.
Two Australian anchors are useful here, with their disclosures attached.
Economy-wide, AMP puts the lost revenue running through financial-stress-driven presenteeism and absenteeism at $88.95 billion a year (Financial Wellness Report 2024, fieldwork July 2024, n=2,475). AMP is a financial services provider, so say so when you use it. And say the other thing too: that is an economy-wide figure, not an employer-level cost. Present it as anything narrower and it will be correctly dismissed.
More useful, because it multiplies: Safe Work Australia found the difference in annual lost productivity between an organisation with a poor psychosocial safety climate and one with a strong climate is $1,887 per employee per year. That research dates from 2016 and remains the most recent Australian estimate of its kind. The age is worth naming rather than hiding - a field whose canonical cost figure is a decade old is a field nobody has been funding.
Multiply it by your own headcount and you have something the person across the table can do arithmetic with while you are still speaking.
The frame that matters
He is not the obstacle. He is a person who has to approve spending and has, so far, been given no basis to.
Everything above exists so that saying yes is the low-risk option rather than the brave one.
Walk in with the numbers already done
The Missing Line Item is a ten-minute worksheet that builds the figure for you - your headcount, your own data, published Australian research for the parts you cannot see, and the four questions above mapped to where their answers sit on the page. Ungated, and yours to forward.
