Something’s shifting in how the best HR and L&D professionals are approaching training investment.
After fourteen years of working with organisations on workplace wellbeing and mental health, what I’m seeing more and more is a recognition that in order for training to create real commercial impact, to move the dial on absence, engagement, performance, and culture, that the groundwork has to be done first.
And that groundwork has a name. It’s called a learning needs analysis.
The organisations that create the biggest impact from their training spend aren’t the ones that move fastest or spend the most money. They’re the ones that stop, take a step back, and look at the bigger picture before they reach for a solution. That’s the difference between training that creates a genuine return on investment and training that simply ticks a box.
Why So Many Organisations Skip the Learning Needs Analysis
There’s a pattern I’ve watched play out across organisations of every size over the last fourteen years, and it’s worth naming clearly.
Organisations recognise there’s a problem, that something isn’t working. For example, stress and burnout are high, absence is rising, and managers are struggling with conversations they don’t feel equipped for. The immediate response, understandable and well-intentioned, is to jump straight to training. The problem is identified, the budget is approved, and the training is booked. But nobody stopped to ask the bigger questions first.
I spoke with a startup recently, around four hundred people, growing fast, with stress and burnout showing up as a significant problem across the organisation. They wanted mental health training for managers, which made sense. But they wanted to put a hundred and thirty managers through that training in an hour. They hadn’t spoken to their HR business partners about what was actually happening on the ground. They hadn’t gotten clear on what the training was supposed to achieve, hadn’t asked managers what they genuinely needed, and hadn’t been honest about what a single hour could realistically deliver.
When I explored things further with their L&D specialist, what became clear is that stress and burnout weren’t just a training problem. They were also a culture problem. The way the organisation was structured, the pace it was operating at, the expectations being placed on people, those were all contributing to the pressure. Training could play a role, but there was an important conversation to be had about how much it could achieve on its own, and what would need to be true for that investment to be worthwhile.
That’s not an unusual situation. It’s a pattern. And it’s one I see constantly.
Organisations are under pressure, they know there’s a problem, and they react. But reaction without reflection rarely creates the kind of impact you’re looking for, and it rarely creates the commercial return that justifies the spend.
Why Measuring Wellbeing Training Outcomes Is Now a Business Priority
Earlier this year, the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work launched a report at Westminster, Practical Approaches for Measuring Workplace Health and Wellbeing, developed in partnership with Alliance Manchester Business School. The message was clear: wellbeing needs to be treated as a business measure, not an employee perk.
Sir Cary Cooper was direct in his framing. Putting health and wellbeing at the heart of business strategy can improve productivity, reduce presenteeism, and improve staff retention, but strategy alone isn’t enough. It has to be measured and used to drive real improvement, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Organisations need tailored approaches that fit their own context.
Sir Charlie Mayfield went even further, arguing for what he calls “rehumanising the workplace”, a focus on relationships, early intervention, and better line management. His position is that employers should be assessed on outcomes like sickness absence and return-to-work rates, and that ill health and disability aren’t a soft issue. They’re a major, underused lever for UK economic growth.
This is the landscape your organisation is operating in. Employee wellbeing is no longer something you do because it feels like the right thing to do. It’s something you measure, demonstrate, and use to drive performance. And that changes everything about how you need to approach training.
What Is a Learning Needs Analysis and Why Does It Matter for Wellbeing Training?
A learning needs analysis, sometimes called an LNA or training needs analysis, is the process of identifying what your people actually need to learn before you design or commission any training. It draws on real data, both qualitative and quantitative, to map where your people are now against where you need them to be.
When the topic is mental health in the workplace or workplace resilience, the stakes of getting this wrong are higher than they are for a compliance course. You’re asking people to show up and be honest about how they’re really doing. You’re asking managers to step into conversations that feel risky and personal. That only works when the training is designed around what people are genuinely struggling with, not what someone assumed they needed from the outside.
The Westminster report made the point that wellbeing metrics need to be simple, credible, and relevant both internally and externally. That principle applies just as much to training design. If you don’t know what you’re measuring against before you start, you can’t demonstrate whether anything changed, and you can’t make the case for continued investment.
How to Conduct a Learning Needs Analysis for Workplace Wellbeing Training
Step 1: Get Clear on the Problem You’re Actually Trying to Solve
Every effective learning needs analysis begins with clarity on why you’re doing it, and this is where critical thinking matters most.
There are usually two starting points. Problem-led: something’s going wrong and you need to understand what’s driving it before you can address it. Goal-led: you have something you’re working towards, a culture shift, a leadership development initiative, a new way of managing performance and wellbeing, and you need to work out what your people need to get there.
In the context of wellbeing and mental health training, organisations often come with the symptom rather than the cause. Stress and burnout are high, but stress and burnout aren’t the problem you’re trying to solve. The problem is that people aren’t performing consistently, managers aren’t having the right conversations, and the culture doesn’t feel psychologically safe. And sometimes, as with that startup, the training can only ever be part of the answer. Being honest about that at the start is what makes the investment worthwhile.
One organisation we ran mental health training for managers for recognised that stress and burnout were the bi product problem. The real problem was their cost of sales were over £250,000 and stress an burnout were creating costly mistakes, missed project deadlines, customers not repeating business because of the service they were getting. When it comes to building a business case, that’s the real problem and the one that needs to be factored into the measurement of the training, not just standard sickness and absence data or employee engagement scores.
Step 2: Talk to the Right People Before You Design Anything
Before you gather data formally, get the right people involved, and that means going beyond the decision-makers who are signing off the budget.
HR directors, L&D leads, HR business partners, senior leaders, line managers, anyone who’s close enough to what’s happening on the ground to tell you what’s really going on. In our discovery consultations, one of the questions we always ask is this: if we were having a conversation six months after the training, what would you be telling me had changed?
Picture that conversation specifically. What are managers doing differently? What are you seeing in your absence data, your engagement scores, your ER caseload? The answers to those questions shape everything that follows.
Step 3: Define What Success Looks Like Before the Training Starts
Once you’re clear on your goal, get specific about the capabilities needed to achieve it and what measurable change would tell you the training has worked.
For mental health training for managers, success might look like managers confidently initiating early conversations with team members who are struggling, a measurable reduction in ER escalations, or improved psychological safety scores in your next engagement survey. For a resilience programme, it might be employees demonstrating a different relationship with pressure, or leaders modelling calm, clear thinking through a period of significant change.
This is also the stage at which you need to be honest about what’s feasible given your timeframe and resource. If you’re committing to an hour of training, what can that hour realistically achieve, and is that enough to justify the investment? Those are important questions to ask before you spend the budget, not after.
Step 4: Gather Data From Multiple Sources
Drawing on a combination of sources gives you a far more accurate picture than any single method alone, and it reduces the risk of people telling you what they think you want to hear rather than what’s actually true.
Sources worth drawing on include absence and turnover data, engagement survey results, performance review trends, HR and ER case data, and direct conversations with managers and team members. Focus groups can be valuable, as can structured interviews with a representative cross-section of the people the training is designed to reach.
In our experience, some of the most useful information comes from those direct conversations with managers before any training is designed, what comes up about their fears, their barriers, and what they feel underprepared for is often what makes the training genuinely land.
Step 5: Identify Whether Training Is Actually the Right Solution
With your data gathered, you can now map where your people are against where you need them to be and look for the patterns in what you find.
This step requires some nuance, and it’s worth being honest about what you see. A gap in performance or behaviour isn’t always a training problem. Sometimes it points to unclear processes, inadequate support structures, or cultural norms that need to shift at a leadership level, which is precisely what Sir Charlie Mayfield’s emphasis on relationships and line management quality speaks to.
Training alone won’t fix a management culture that hasn’t been examined. Seeing the full picture is what helps you invest in the right response, not just the most obvious one.
Step 6: Design Training That Fits What You’ve Found
Now that you know what’s needed, you can make a genuinely informed decision about what will create the change you’re looking for.
For workplace wellbeing and mental health, that might include mental health training for managers delivered across multiple sessions rather than crammed into a single day, resilience training for leaders that go beyond coping strategies and help leaders understand the mind differently, employee wellbeing webinars that give people practical insight they can use immediately, or trauma support for teams that have experienced significant organisational events.
What format works best will depend on what you’ve learned in the data gathering stage. The key is that the decision is evidence-led rather than assumption-led.
Step 7: Evaluate Against the Goals You Set at the Start
Once the training is live, go back to the target you defined in step one. Are managers having more conversations? Is absence reducing? Are engagement scores shifting? Are fewer cases escalating to HR?
At The Mind Solution, we provide detailed ROI and engagement reporting as standard, so organisations can track pre- and post-change in burnout, engagement, and resilience with real data to share with their leadership teams. That’s not a nice-to-have. It’s what makes the case for continued investment, and it’s exactly what the evidence coming out of Westminster is calling for.
The Organisations That Get the Best Return From Wellbeing Training
The organisations that create the biggest impact from their training investment aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that stop before they act, ask the big picture questions, talk to the people closest to the problem, and get honest about what they’re trying to achieve and what’s realistic given the time and resource available.
That’s critical thinking applied to learning and development. And it’s what separates a training initiative that creates genuine commercial return from one that ticks a box and disappears.
Ready to Find Out What Your Organisation Actually Needs?
At The Mind Solution, every training consultation starts with a conversation about what’s really going on before we ever talk about what to deliver.
If you’re ready to invest in workplace wellbeing or mental health training that creates lasting change, book a free consultation and let’s start there.
