The math of doing nothing.
Inaction isn't free. It just doesn't send an invoice. Model the productivity loss, the management burden, and the replacement bill against the price of support, and the case makes itself.
Every benefits decision gets weighed against its cost. Support for employees in a life transition is easy to defer because the line item is visible and the return feels soft. But doing nothing has a cost too. It just never shows up as a purchase order. It's distributed across departments, buried in a hundred small slippages, and paid quietly for years. When you model it properly, the do-nothing option is almost always the most expensive one on the table.
Build the model from three inputs. First, lost productivity. When an employee is consumed by a separation, a parent's illness, or a bereavement, their output drops and often stays down for months. Depression alone, one common downstream effect of prolonged life stress, is estimated to cost Canadian employers more than $16 billion a year in combined absenteeism and presenteeism.1 Across all causes, Canadian employers lost an average of 48 days per employee in a single year to health-related absence and presenteeism.2 That's the quiet cost: people at their desks, not fully able to work.
The second and third inputs
Second, management burden. A struggling employee doesn't struggle in isolation. Their manager reworks schedules, redistributes tasks, has the difficult conversations, and spends supervisory hours holding the line. That time has a real cost and it pulls a more senior, more expensive person away from their own priorities.
Third, and by far the largest, replacement. If the person leaves, and people in unsupported crisis disproportionately do, you pay to replace them. In Canada, that runs from about 20 percent of annual salary for a junior role to well over 100 percent for a senior or specialized one.3 On an average Canadian salary, insurers have pegged the cost of a single departure at roughly 40 percent of pay, or in the neighbourhood of $18,000 per person.3 Now apply your own turnover rate, which for Canadian organizations averages around 21 percent,4 and the aggregate is not a rounding error.
Now weigh it against the price of support
Set the do-nothing cost, productivity loss plus management drag plus even one avoidable departure, against the price of getting someone specialized support through their transition. The support is modest and finite. The costs it prevents are large and recurring. The Mental Health Commission of Canada estimates a $1.62 return for every dollar invested in workplace mental health, mostly through reduced absenteeism and recovered productivity.5 Preventing a single senior departure can pay for a great deal of proactive support on its own.
The recovery is the part finance leaders tend to underweight. When someone in the middle of a separation or an estate gets a clear plan and a credentialed guide, the reactive scramble ends. The midnight uncertainty is replaced with a sequence they can follow. The stress stops bleeding into every meeting, and the quiet decision to leave never gets made. That's what our Next Chapter programs are built to deliver, and it's where the ROI actually lives, in output regained and a resignation avoided.
Doing nothing feels like the cautious, cost-neutral choice. The math says it's neither. The cheaper decision is to support the person before the invoice you never see becomes the one you can't ignore.