Proving ROI: How Mental Health Apps Reduce Turnover
- James Colley
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Why turnover is a finance problem—and a wellbeing solution
Turnover is one of the largest controllable costs in any organisation. Recruitment fees, onboarding time, lost productivity, and team disruption compound quickly. For many roles, replacing one employee runs from half to a full year of salary; for technical and senior positions the true cost often climbs higher. When viewed through that lens, employee wellbeing is not a “perk” — it is a retention system with direct financial impact.
At therappai, we see mental-health applications as core performance infrastructure. When employees have immediate, private, and culturally sensitive support—any hour, any location—they stay longer, miss fewer days, and contribute more fully. The result is measurable savings and a stronger, more resilient culture.
If you’re new to the space, start with our foundation: Mental Health Applications: The Complete 2025 Guide for HR Leaders & Workplace Wellbeing. For the technology behind modern platforms — LLMs, sentiment understanding, personalisation, and ethical safeguards — see How AI Is Used in Modern Mental Health Applications. This article builds on both and focuses on one question every CHRO must answer: what’s the ROI?
The retention model: how wellbeing converts to ROI
Return on investment is the simplest language for alignment between HR and Finance. To show ROI from mental health apps, we connect three outcomes:
Fewer leavers (turnover reduction)
Fewer lost days (absenteeism and presenteeism gains)
More effective working time (productivity lift)
Each of these can be modeled with conservative, defensible assumptions. Your goal is not to promise miracles; it’s to demonstrate credible savings that leadership can track quarterly.
A practical ROI walk-through with real numbers
Imagine a 1,000-employee company with an average salary of USD $70,000 and a 15% annual voluntary turnover rate.
Baseline leavers: 150 people per year
Conservative replacement cost: 50% of salary (≈ $35,000 per leaver)
Annual turnover cost: 150 × $35,000 = $5,250,000
Now deploy a mental-health application and measure a 20% reduction in voluntary turnover over 12 months (from 15% to 12%). That prevents 30 departures:
Turnover savings: 30 × $35,000 = $1,050,000
Program cost: $150 per employee × 1,000 employees = $150,000
Net impact (turnover alone): $1,050,000 − $150,000 = $900,000
ROI ratio (turnover alone): $1,050,000 ÷ $150,000 = 7.0×
That’s before accounting for absenteeism and productivity.
Absenteeism: If your workforce averages 10 unscheduled absence days per employee per year and the platform reduces that by a conservative 10% (to 9 days), you save one day per employee. At ~$280 per day (salary ÷ workdays), that’s $280,000 across 1,000 employees.
Productivity / presenteeism: If improved mental health increases effective working time by just 2%, the annual value per employee is ~$1,400. Capture only half for conservatism: $700,000 across 1,000 employees.
Combined benefit (illustrative):
Turnover savings: $1,050,000
Absenteeism savings: $280,000
Productivity (conservative): $700,000
Total annual benefit: $2,030,000
Program cost: $150,000
Overall ROI: ≈ 13.5× (about $13.50 back for every $1 invested)
Want to pressure-test your own numbers? Use the therappai ROI Calculator here: Open the ROI Calculator.
ROI from mental health apps table
Try your numbers Use the therappai ROI Calculator
Making the business case to leadership
A strong business case is conservative, transparent, and testable.
Start by baselining: current turnover rate, average salary, backfill time, absence days, and (if available) simple output metrics like revenue per FTE or tasks per FTE. Align on a replacement-cost band with Finance (eg, 0.5×–1× salary for most roles; more for specialized roles). Record engagement gaps that a mental-health application could plausibly address—delayed access to help, low EAP utilization, shift-worker constraints, or stigma.
Propose a pilot of six to twelve months for a clear population—an entire function, a location, or a shift group. Measure pre-pilot and in-pilot turnover trends, absence days, engagement with the app, and simple productivity proxies acceptable to Finance. Keep assumptions modest, report quarterly, and agree on go/no-go thresholds for expansion.
Emphasise ethics and privacy from day one. Employees engage when they trust the system: explain what is tracked, how it’s anonymised, and how insights will be used to improve work—not to monitor individuals. Pair the technology with managerial enablement: help leaders talk about mental health with empathy and clarity so the program feels like support, not scrutiny.
Why AI mental-health platforms outperform legacy approaches
EAP hotlines and static content libraries rarely meet today’s needs. Distributed work, language diversity, and 24/7 schedules require support that is immediate, personal, and culturally sensitive. This is where AI changes the game.
Modern platforms combine language understanding (to interpret nuance), sentiment and emotion detection (to adapt in real time), personalisation (to tailor interventions and timing), and ethical guardrails (to protect privacy and ensure safe escalation). That mix increases utilization—often several times higher than legacy programs—which is precisely why ROI improves. When more people use support earlier, you prevent more attrition and more lost days.
If you’d like the technology primer behind those outcomes, read our companion piece: How AI Is Used in Modern Mental Health Applications. To see where wellbeing fits in your broader HR strategy—including compliance, procurement criteria, and cross-functional adoption—revisit the 2025 HR Leader’s Guide.
From numbers to culture: what retention really buys you
Reducing turnover isn’t only a budget win; it’s a capability win. Teams stabilize. Knowledge compounds. Customer relationships deepen. Managers spend less time recruiting and more time coaching. The intangible benefits of retention—quality, safety, innovation—are precisely the foundations of long-term performance. When wellbeing is part of everyday operations, not a siloed perk, those benefits scale.
How to implement well—and measure fairly
Keep the rollout humane and the metrics honest. Communicate clearly that the program is designed to support people, not watch them. Offer multiple ways to engage—text, video, short check-ins—so shift workers, remote crews, and knowledge workers all have a path that fits their day. Set realistic engagement targets and celebrate progress. Above all, create predictable escalation for higher-risk moments so the right human help appears fast.
On measurement, separate individual privacy from team-level insight. Share anonymised trends — utilization rates, mood indices, peaks in stress relative to project cycles. Invite employee councils or representative groups to review the dashboards and provide feedback. As trust builds, engagement rises, and your ROI strengthens.
Your next step
You already have the baseline inputs. Put them into the calculator, generate two or three scenarios, and take them to Finance:
Open the therappai ROI Calculator → Try it with your numbers
Explore the strategy context → The 2025 HR Leader’s Guide
Understand the tech enabling the ROI → How AI Is Used in Modern Mental Health Applications
When you connect credible savings to an ethical, high-utilization platform, the case writes itself.
About therappai
therappai is the world’s first AI video-therapy platform designed for enterprise. We combine human-centred design with large-language models, real-time sentiment understanding, personalisation, and rigorous ethical guardrails to deliver immediate, private support at scale—across shifts, languages, and locations. Our mission is simple: make mental-health support more accessible, more empathetic, and more effective for every team.
Ready to model the ROI for your workforce?Run the numbers, then book a conversation with our team. Try the calculator: therappai ROI Calculator
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