Drewberry™ uses cookies to offer you the best experience online. By continuing to use our website you agree to the use of cookies including for ad personalization.
If you would like to know more about cookies and how to manage them please view our privacy & cookie policy.
There’s a moment that a lot of HR managers and business owners will recognise. The renewal meeting comes around, absence figures are up again, stress and mental health are cited as the main drivers, and the conversation ends with “let’s make sure we’re reminding people about the EAP.” Then the same thing happens twelve months later.
Debbie Kleiner knows that moment well. She spent years in it, from the other side of the table, as a medical insurance intermediary. And it’s exactly why she changed direction.
Debbie is the Director of Wellbeing in Work, a qualified Mental Health First Aid England (MHFA England) Instructor, an MHFA England Associate, and now one of our specialist contributors.
We’ve partnered with Debbie to bring employers and HR professionals practical, evidence-based wellbeing content that goes a lot further than the stress ball and the motivational poster. Here’s the story of how she got here, what she believes, and why we think she’s exactly the kind of voice this conversation needs.
Debbie’s professional life began in financial services. She built and ran her own medical insurance intermediary business, sat on the committee of the Association of Medical Insurance Intermediaries (AMII) in roles as both treasurer and PR lead, and spent years advising companies on health and protection benefits.
When she sold her business to Chase Templeton, one of the consolidators that went on to absorb a number of brokers in the market, she didn’t just move on. She went back to study.
Debbie completed a Master’s degree in Workplace Health and Wellbeing, which gave her the academic framework to understand what actually drives wellbeing outcomes in organisations, beyond employee benefits and recognition schemes, important as those are. She then qualified as a Mental Health First Aid England Instructor, before MHFA England themselves approached her to become an associate.
That associate status isn’t just a badge. It means Debbie works directly with MHFA England to develop and deliver training, and it’s led to some genuinely significant work. Most recently, she co-wrote a bespoke version of the MHFA England programme specifically for the financial services sector, the first time the course had been tailored for that industry.
When Simply Health came to MHFA England wanting to train a hundred companies, it was Debbie’s background in FCA-regulated financial services that made her the right person to help shape the course content. The result is a programme that actually speaks the language of the people taking it.
She is now the Director of Wellbeing in Work, bringing together expertise from a team of specialists across four key service areas: Leadership Development, Organisational Consulting and Change Management, Workplace Wellbeing, and Mental Health and Crisis Support.
Ask Debbie why wellbeing matters and you’ll get a direct, structured answer. She’s heard every objection, and she has a response to all of them.
“Recruiting people costs a lot of money. Losing people costs more.” The evidence base here is substantial. The CIPD and Simply Health publish annual research on stress, mental health, and absence at work, and the picture is consistent year on year. Mental health-related absence is rising, productivity loss is significant, and staff turnover driven by poor wellbeing culture is one of the most expensive problems a business can face.
Debbie has seen this first hand. When she ran her own business, which grew to around 20 people, she was close enough to her team to see directly how the environment she created affected how they performed. Making people feel genuinely valued wasn’t just the right thing to do. It made the business better. She’s also recently been working with a business in the aerospace sector that was losing staff consistently to a competitor.
It’s not about pay. It’s about “how does my employer make me feel?” That’s what it comes down to.
Debbie Kleiner
Director, Wellbeing in Work
This is the one that tends to stop people in their tracks. Employers have a legal duty of care when it comes to workplace stress. The Health and Safety Executive requires businesses to carry out stress risk assessments on a regular basis, and the vast majority simply don’t know this.
In December 2024, Birmingham University was fined a significant sum for failing to conduct one. When Debbie posted about it on LinkedIn, it generated more engagement than anything she’d ever shared, because the reaction, almost universally, was: “We don’t do that either.”
Stress is a risk. If you’re imposing undue stress on your employees, it’s against the law. And a lot of employers have no idea.
Debbie Kleiner
Director, Wellbeing in Work
For businesses that lead with values, and most say they do, wellbeing is where those values get tested. A company that talks about caring for its people has to be able to show it in practice. For Debbie, that means going well beyond a benefits package that ticks a box.
One of the things that makes Debbie’s perspective so valuable is that she’ll tell you when you’re wasting your money. Even on things she delivers herself.
Don’t spend thousands on one initiative if you’re doing nothing else. If it’s a toxic culture where the managers are rolling their eyes when you call in sick with stress, forget it. You’re just wasting your money.
Debbie Kleiner
Director, Wellbeing in Work
The root issue, in her view, is that too many businesses spend money on the wrong things – or on the right things in the wrong order. Real wellbeing culture change starts with leadership. With the way managers show up for their teams every day. With the questions they ask, or don’t ask, in one-to-ones.
And the biggest blocker to doing any of this properly? Convincing the board.
People teams might well understand, but they can’t convince the board that by investing in leadership training, they’ll see a bottom line improvement. They don’t have the business case.
Debbie Kleiner
Director, Wellbeing in Work
This is a theme Debbie comes back to repeatedly: the gap between the people who understand the problem and the people who control the budget. A lot of Debbie’s work is aimed directly at closing that gap, giving HR professionals and Wellbeing Leads the tools to make the case upwards.
In conversation, Debbie references Professor Cary Cooper of Manchester University, former chair of the CIPD and a leading figure in workplace health research, who said at the Mad World conference that if your managers don’t have empathy, you should fire them. Debbie wouldn’t put it quite that bluntly in practice. But the underlying point is one she agrees with.
Managers need to be promoted not because they’ve had years of experience in their job, but because they’re good managers of people. And then you have to give them ongoing training.
Debbie Kleiner
Director, Wellbeing in Work
Many perfectly capable managers simply aren’t equipped to create the kind of psychological safety that would allow someone to say they were struggling before they hit burnout. Not because they’re unkind, but because they’ve never been trained to check in properly, never been given a framework, and never had anyone tell them that it’s their job to notice.
We need to train managers to understand it’s their job to ask how people are feeling. One-to-one meetings shouldn’t be about to-do lists or work tasks, but asking employees about what’s worrying them, how stressed they’re feeling, and if there’s anything the manager is doing (however inadvertently) that is imposing stress on them.
Debbie Kleiner
Director, Wellbeing in Work
Debbie uses the idea of a heat map: every employee in a business should be covered by someone who has their finger on the pulse. No-one should fall through the cracks between annual appraisals, burning out quietly while everyone assumes they’re fine.
On the question of whether empathy can be taught: yes, she says, it can. But where it genuinely can’t, there are structural solutions. In her own previous business, where some line managers weren’t naturally empathetic, she’d arrange for a different person, someone with high emotional intelligence, not necessarily at manager level, to take on the pastoral one-to-one role, while the line manager continued to manage workload and performance. Two conversations, same time slot, split into two parts. Not paying for two managers, just making sure the right person is having the right conversation.
Debbie is clear that group risk and employee benefits products are genuinely valuable, but only when they’re embedded in a culture that actually uses them.
Products like Vitality are incredible. But if someone like me comes along and says, “You’re already paying for it, let’s use it, let’s get more out of it,” that’s where the value really starts.
Debbie Kleiner
Director, Wellbeing in Work
The same goes for EAPs, Health Cash Plans, and any other wellbeing-adjacent benefit. If employees don’t know about them, don’t trust them, or work in a culture where asking for help is implicitly discouraged, the benefits sit unused and the problems continue regardless of the premium being paid.
The opportunity is to connect both sides of the conversation. Great employee benefits and great wellbeing culture aren’t competing priorities. They reinforce each other. The products work better when the culture supports them, and the culture is more credible when it’s backed by genuine investment.
We believe the best employee benefits strategies go hand-in-hand with a genuine commitment to wellbeing culture. If you’d like to explore how that works in practice, whether that’s reviewing your existing benefits package, thinking through a wellbeing strategy, or just having a conversation about where to start, our employee benefits specialists are here to help.
Putting together the right employee benefits programme for your staff can be a difficult task, as is finding the right balance between cost and coverage.
Our dedicated specialists gather and compare quotes for you from across the UK market. Once that’s done, we provide a recommendation report detailing the most suitable employee benefits for your circumstances. Get in touch with our team by calling 02084327333 or submitting an enquiry.
Workplace wellbeing is about creating the conditions for people to stay healthy and resilient, while also enabling them to feel motivated, productive, and able to perform at their best
Debbie helps organisations to address the real drivers of wellbeing – from supporting brain health and harnessing stress as a performance advantage to strengthening human connection.
Tel: +44 (0) 7968 509642
www.stepinsidegroup.com
