Employer-funded therapy, and exactly how it works

If you are still deciding whether to fund therapy for your team, the workplace wellbeing page makes that case, with the return-on-investment research attached. This page assumes you have decided and want to know how the thing runs.

• You get a booking page. Set up for your organisation, with your allowance policy stated on it in plain words. You share the link however you normally share things.
• An employee goes to it in their own time. No manager approval, no internal form, no HR sign-off. That matters: an approval step is the reason most internal wellbeing schemes go unused.
• They are matched, then they choose. They tell us what they are dealing with, we put forward therapists who actually work with that, and they have a free fifteen-minute call with whoever they pick before committing to anything.
• Sessions happen on our platform. Online or in person, scheduled between the person and their therapist.
• You get an invoice for what was delivered, plus an anonymised count. Nothing else reaches you.

Billing is per session delivered, in arrears, from Thrive Haven Ltd. There is no per-employee licence, which means a quiet month costs you very little and a hard month costs you more, which is the correct way round.

• Optional monthly cap. A ceiling on total spend per month, so the invoice can never exceed a number your finance team has already agreed.
• Optional per-person allowance. A number of funded sessions per employee per year or per programme period.
• Optional co-payment. Some organisations fund a percentage rather than the whole session, with the employee paying the rest. This works, and it does slightly reduce take-up, so it is a trade-off worth making deliberately.

We quote the per-session rate in the first conversation rather than publishing it, because the shape of the programme moves it. That conversation is free and takes about fifteen minutes.

You see: the number of sessions delivered in the period and the amount to pay. That is the whole list.

You never see: who booked, who attended, which department they are in, what they discussed, what their therapist thought, or whether a particular person is using the benefit at all. Not on request, not for a manager who is worried, not in an anonymised form that could be de-anonymised by counting.

This is not us being difficult. It is the condition on which anybody uses a therapy benefit honestly. A programme where staff suspect their attendance is visible is a programme that gets used by the people with the least to hide, and the full boundary is written down on the clinical governance page so you can forward it rather than paraphrase it.

The single biggest predictor of whether a therapy benefit gets used is whether people believe it is genuinely confidential. Three things are worth saying explicitly when you announce it.

• That nobody internal will know who used it. Say it plainly, in the announcement itself, not in a policy document.
• That it is not only for work problems. Otherwise people who are struggling with something at home assume they are not eligible.
• How many sessions they have. Vagueness here reads as a trap.

It also helps if it is announced by someone senior rather than buried in a benefits portal, and re-announced a couple of months later. Almost nobody acts on this kind of thing the first time they read about it.

A standing benefit is the wrong instrument for a live event. If a specific thing has happened, to your staff or to your customers, the shape you want is a bounded programme with reserved capacity rather than an open benefit. That is incident and change support for staff, or crisis response for customers. Organisations often end up running both.