How to Get a Wellbeing Speaker Signed Off, and Where It Sits With Your Work-Related Stress Obligations

This article exists because of an email I got last November. A HR manager told me she wanted to book me, she had the date, and she could not get the money released because her finance director wanted to know what it was for in terms he recognised. She asked me, fairly enough, whether I had anything she could forward. I did not. So this is that page.

Ibec puts the cost of poor mental health to Irish employers at up to €2,000 per employee per year in its Hidden Balance Sheet report. CIPD Ireland’s HR Practices survey, published in May 2026, found mental health is now the leading cause of absence in 51% of Irish organisations, with 28% reporting absence levels rising.

Those are the two figures I would build a case on, because they are published, attributable and Irish. For a company of four hundred people the Ibec figure puts the annual exposure at up to €800,000, which makes a keynote fee of somewhere between €2,000 and €10,000 an arithmetic conversation rather than a philosophical one.

I would add one more piece of context, because finance people ask. Ibec’s February 2026 briefing on the gap between occupational safety and wellbeing drew on EU-OSHA survey data putting severe time pressure or work overload at 44% of Irish workers and harassment or bullying at 8%. The same briefing flagged that the EU-OSHA Healthy Work campaign for 2026 to 2028 is focused on psychosocial risk and mental health, which means this is the direction guidance is travelling, not a passing theme.

No, and I would be careful of any speaker who implies otherwise. Under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 an Irish employer has a general duty to manage risks to health, and the Health and Safety Authority treats work-related stress within that. A talk is not a control measure. It can be documented as part of a wider response.

The Health and Safety Authority’s own guidance for employers organises work-related stress around six areas, and they are worth knowing even if you never book a speaker at all. Those areas are the demands placed on people, the control they have over their work, the support available to them, the quality of workplace relationships, clarity of role, and how change is managed. A keynote realistically touches support and, if it is a good one, relationships. It does nothing whatsoever about demands, control or role clarity, and those are usually where the real problem lives.

I say this in proposals because it is true and because it protects both of us. If your organisation is relying on an hour from me to discharge a duty, the auditor will not be impressed and neither will your staff. I would rather be paragraph three of your wellbeing plan than the whole of it.

• Demands, the workload and pace people are carrying
• Control, how much say people have over their own work
• Support, from the organisation and from managers
• Relationships, including conflict and bullying
• Role, whether people know what is expected of them
• Change, and how it is managed and communicated

Be careful with both, because the position in Ireland is not what generic advice assumes. Ireland missed the June 2026 deadline to transpose the EU pay transparency directive, and corporate sustainability reporting thresholds were raised considerably by the Omnibus amendments finalised in March 2026, which puts most Irish employers outside the scope.

If you use either of those in an internal paper without the caveat, somebody in your legal team will correct you and your credibility goes with it. For very large multinationals the reporting argument still holds, and supply chain effects reach further than the thresholds suggest. For everybody else, the absence and retention figures are the stronger ground.

Put the euro exposure first, the fee second, the scope third and the risk controls fourth. Finance reads in that order. Lead with the Ibec per employee figure multiplied by your headcount, state the fee band and what it includes, say what the session is and is not, and close with insurance, cancellation terms and safeguarding.

Here is the shape of it, which you are free to lift. Poor mental health costs Irish employers up to €2,000 per employee per year according to Ibec, and mental health is the leading cause of absence in 51% of Irish organisations according to CIPD Ireland. We propose a one hour external keynote at a cost of X, tailored to our own situation through a pre-event briefing call, as the opening session of our wellbeing programme rather than as a standalone event. The speaker carries public liability and professional indemnity cover, works from lived experience rather than clinical practice and states that explicitly, and has a defined approach to signposting. We will measure effect through a post-session survey and through absence and engagement data at six months.

That last sentence is the one that gets it approved, in my experience. Not the story, and not the mountain. The commitment to measure it.

Measure three things. Whether the session was rated useful rather than enjoyable, whether people took a specific intended action, and whether the underlying indicator you care about moves over the following months. Ask about usefulness and intent within forty-eight hours, and look at absence, engagement or manager confidence at six months.

The survey questions that give you something worth reporting are narrower than the ones usually asked. Rather than asking whether people enjoyed it, ask whether anything in the session applied to their own situation, whether they intend to do anything differently, and what specifically. Ask managers separately whether they feel better equipped to open a conversation with somebody who is struggling. Report the sample size, because a score of 4.6 from nine people out of four hundred is not evidence and a sceptical director will spot it.

The honest caveat is that you will not get a clean causal line from one hour to an absence figure, and you should not claim one. I have never sent a client a number claiming my talk reduced absence by a percentage, and I would be slow to trust a speaker who does.

Enda O’Doherty charges from €2,000 to €10,000 depending on audience size, location, duration and format. That includes a pre-event consultation call, a keynote tailored to the organisation, early arrival on the day, a digital copy of the book for attendees and a follow-up resource afterwards. Travel and overnight accommodation are quoted separately where they apply.

What moves the number is mostly logistics rather than ego. A morning in Dublin from Waterford is a different proposition to a two day round trip to a plant in the north west with an overnight. Recording rights, a second session on the same day or a breakout with the leadership team all change it too, and I would rather price those in at the start than surprise you.

If your budget year runs on the calendar, the useful time to be having this conversation is October and November, which is roughly when nobody is having it. Then everyone rings in the second week of January looking for a date in February.