Twenty questions.
Answered directly.

Your EAP, support or wellness programmes, apps and meditation all reach the people willing to come forward and use them. For EAPs, the only kind with published national figures, EAPA UK reports average utilisation moving from around 4% to more than 10%. Your own provider reports your figure, and yours is the one that matters. Whatever it is, everybody else is the gap PRC is built for. Specifically the senior professionals and mid-tier leaders who have calculated what a clinical record costs them and decided against it. The audit measures how far the two groups overlap in your own organisation.

If you do not know your own figure, that is what a Total Support Usage Audit produces, before any decision about PRC is on the table. It is £3,450 for one site of up to 500 staff. See question twelve.

Procuring PRC requires no change to your existing EAP or Occupational Health contract. It runs alongside all of it. PRC addresses the gap your support was never designed to reach. Not because any of it is inadequate, but because every format that asks people to come forward is closed to that population.

One more reason to measure before buying anything, PRC included. A study of 46,336 workers in 233 UK organisations found that people who took part in individual programmes were no better off than people who did not, and pointed to changes in how work is organised instead. That is why the Usage Audit report ranks changes to your workplace first, cheapest first, and puts any programme you might buy, PRC’s included, last.

The PRC Index is self-rated across seven operational measures at Days 1, 30, 60, and 90. The employer receives aggregate cohort movement, the average shift across all participants on each measure. That is the correct unit of measurement for a site-wide performance protocol: did the cohort move, and by how much.

Individual scores never reach you. PRC holds them only to run the protocol, against an email address and a seat number, never a name, and there is no route by which you could ask for them. This is the same reason PRC reaches the people it reaches. The group figure is the reporting. It is enough for commercial review, board reporting, and any internal audit of how well your support works.

What the data cannot tell you is which individual moved. It can tell you, for example, that 24 seats completed the protocol and the average PRC Index moved by 2.4 points across seven measures. Those figures are illustrative; no cohort has yet completed the protocol. For a site-wide licence, that is the right number to look at.

Why ninety days. The best-known study of how habits form found a typical time of 66 days for a new daily behaviour to become automatic, with a range from 18 to 254 days, and found that missing a single day made no real difference. Ninety days is built around that range. The emails keep coming on schedule, so a missed day resets nothing and nobody is told they have failed. Lally and colleagues, 2010.

PRC is not a clinical service and does not position itself as one. If a clinical concern surfaces during the protocol, the participant is directed explicitly to their GP or NHS 111. Their seat is held. No fee is applied. No restart penalty. The protocol resumes when they are ready.

If a participant self-rates below an operational safety threshold, the automated system appends standard UK clinical and helpline signposting (NHS 111 / Samaritans) directly to their next email. The system does not notify HR, does not break anonymity, and creates no clinical record.

The disclosures are written in plain language and appear in every email the participant receives. PRC does not diagnose, treat, or refer. It does not create a clinical record. Participation has no bearing on any clinical pathway the participant is currently using or may use in future. The two are structurally separate.

Your existing EAP and Occupational Health handle clinical and case-managed need exactly as they do now. If a participant needs that route, they are directed there. PRC is not a substitute. It is the layer for the people who will not engage with either route.

This is the framing question and it is the right one. PRC is not sent by HR as a support offer. It is a general all-staff communication, from the HR Director, in the same register as any operational announcement. Every employee at the organisation receives identical communication. No individual is singled out.

The subject lines are performance-framed: "Most of a working day runs on autopilot", "Available to everyone here, private to you", "Ninety days, in your inbox, off the record." The all-staff email template, the participant recognition page, and the enrolment page are all written in that register. No clinical language. No support-service framing.

The message is: this is available. What you do with it is private. We cannot see who takes it up. Jon briefs the HR Director on this positioning before deployment and is available for any internal communications review. The framing is not optional. It is what makes the product reach the population it is built for.

This answer is about the 90-day protocol. It is £9,750 for the year, and the audit fee comes off it in full. Three founding places get the first 90 days free, for audits booked by 31 January 2027, then pay like everyone else. The Total Support Usage Audit is a separate, paid product at £3,450. It is one annual licence, site-wide, with no seat cap. £9,750 for one site of up to 500 employees, and above 500 priced on headcount, from £9,750.

When you do compare it, cost per employee is the wrong unit, and for many employers there is no cost to compare. Much of it came bundled, the EAP especially, with income protection, life cover or health insurance and has no separate price. The comparison that holds either way is usage. At the 3% to 5% take-up employers report from their own scheme, 95 to 97 in every 100 employees do not use it. PRC is delivered to those people, so the right comparison is how many people each one actually gets to, not headline cost per employee.

The second comparison is against the cost of the problem, and that does not wait for pricing. One £70k senior at 70% capacity for six months is around £10,500 in lost output. That figure is running today, whether or not anything is bought.

You do not have to take the sector figure on trust either. A Total Support Usage Audit measures usage on your own workforce rather than a sector average: how many of the people who answered actually used your current support. You never tell us what you pay. If you pay for your support separately, you can put that price against the usage number yourself, in your own office. See question twelve.

That is the right response to most procurement decisions. This one is worth thinking about quickly because the cost of the status quo accrues daily and the downside of trying PRC is small and fixed.

What thinking about it usually protects against is internal risk, taking something to a board or budget holder that does not land. The risk profile here is smaller than it looks. The three funded places exist precisely for this situation: a defined entry point and the first 90 days with no protocol fee, for audits booked by 31 January 2027. The only cost is the Total Support Usage Audit at £3,450, which comes first and sets the order places are given out. After the three funded places, the protocol is £9,750 a year, with the audit fee credited in full.

The thinking that needs to happen can happen in a 30-minute call with Jon. If PRC is not the right fit, you will be told on that call.

The protocol is £9,750 a year and the Usage Audit fee comes off it in full. Three founding places get the first 90 days free, for audits booked by 31 January 2027, then pay like everyone else. Set either figure against the cost of doing nothing. Compared to that, doing nothing is not a neutral position. Left alone, the pattern does not fix itself.

Every quarter it runs unchecked, the gap between what that person is capable of and what they are currently producing widens. The people around them absorb the drag. The decisions they are not making, the conversations they are not having, the work sitting in their queue. That cost is already on your books. It is just not on a line item you can see yet.

The cost of not acting is not zero. It is the daily rate of the pattern running, multiplied by every person in your workforce carrying one. That cost is already being paid. PRC puts it on a line item and addresses it.

That is a process question, not an objection to PRC. The materials to make that case internally already exist. Jon can prepare a board-ready briefing note, one page and commercial framing only, for any organisation where the sign-off sits above the HR Director.

The board argument is not a soft argument. It is a liability argument. Since April 2026, sick pay is due from the first day off sick, so part of the cost now sits on payroll, where finance can see it. That is a finance conversation, not an HR conversation, and it lands differently in a boardroom.

The funded place also removes the approval barrier at source. With the audit fee credited in full against the protocol, and the first 90 days free for the three founding places (audits booked by 31 January 2027), the first commitment is £3,450 rather than £9,750. The board case is made on the results, not on the proposal.

PRC Workforce holds participant data as data controller. The organisation is not in the data chain for individual participant records at any point. The employer receives aggregate cohort reporting only. No personal data about any individual is transferred to the organisation at any stage.

Participants enrol using a personal email on a personal device. A seat number is assigned. The email is held only to deliver the protocol and is never shared with the employer; it is deleted on request at any time, and on a defined retention schedule set out in the data processing agreement. No name is recorded at any point, and to the employer each participant is a seat number and nothing more.

The organisation does not process personal health data through PRC, which is the usual trigger for a Data Protection Impact Assessment. Employers should confirm the position with their own DPO. PRC is not a health monitoring tool. It is a structured email protocol. The data it processes is completion and self-report index data, held by PRC Workforce under UK GDPR.

Low uptake on existing support is almost always a format problem, not a demand problem. The people who most need support are not using what you already have because every route requires them to identify themselves. That is not apathy. That is a calculated decision about career risk, insurance implications, and how they are perceived.

PRC removes the identification requirement from the first step. No self-referral. No name on anything. The all-staff communication goes to everyone simultaneously, which means enrolling carries no signal to anyone. There is no list to be on. There is no pattern to identify from a click.

The funded place is the answer to this concern before it becomes a concern. Run it across the whole site, with no cap on numbers. The uptake data from a real cohort gives you the answer, and gives you the board case if the numbers land. A protocol that reaches the people your support does not will produce different uptake numbers than a platform nobody opens.

Staff without a work email. You share the same link any way you already reach them: a notice, the intranet or a team briefing. People answer on their own phone, with nothing to download. The report prints the number you tell us the invitation reached, so you can see who was asked.

Platform fatigue is real and it is a legitimate concern. It is also a different problem to the one PRC addresses. Platform fatigue happens when content-on-demand platforms accumulate without producing outcomes. An app nobody opens, a content library that gets browsed once, a portal that HR logs into and employees do not. These add to the noise. PRC adds nothing to that noise.

PRC is not a platform. It is an email sequence. There is nothing to log into, nothing to download, no library to browse. It arrives in the participant's inbox on a fixed schedule and asks for a specific response. The format is the same one the participant already uses for everything else they actually do. There is no new behaviour required to access it. That is precisely why it reaches the people everything else does not.

Adding PRC does not add to your programme stack. It adds one email sequence per enrolled participant, delivered to a personal device, with no HR system involvement and no interface for anyone to manage or maintain.

Nothing direct, and we will not tell you otherwise. Since April 2026, statutory sick pay is due from the first day off sick. The earnings floor has gone. It is paid at 80% of earnings or the flat weekly rate, whichever is lower, and the Fair Work Agency now enforces it. That is a payroll matter. PRC does not touch it and makes no claim to lower it.

The new rules put a price on the first days off. They put no price on the days people come in and produce less. On the national figures, the second cost is the bigger one: 44 productive days a year lost to working while unwell, against 6.7 days of sickness absence. Day-one sick pay makes the smaller cost easier to see. It does nothing to show you the bigger one.

The Usage Audit asks how many days people were off sick in the last four weeks, how well they say they worked over the same four weeks, and on how many days something outside work made the job harder. That gives you your own starting figures, from staff who never put a name to them. People tell a survey their employer paid for less than is true, so read each one as the least it could be. The repeat audit at twelve months shows which way they moved. It cannot prove why.

Partly, and the report says exactly how far. Every employer has a legal duty to assess the risk of work-related stress and act on it. HSE names six areas to cover: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. HSE says it will look into an organisation where there is evidence of a wider failing and a number of staff are affected. It does not, in general, investigate single cases.

The Usage Audit is evidence toward that assessment. It is not the assessment. It covers demands, control and support. It does not cover relationships, role or change. The back page of every report sets this out area by area, so nobody in your organisation can mistake one for the other.

What it does give you is a dated record that you asked your staff: how many you asked, how many answered and what they said, in figures nobody can trace to a person. HSE expects staff to be involved in the assessment. A record like this is part of showing you did it. Keep it with your absence and staff turnover records and whatever else your assessment already uses.

PRC Workforce is not certified against the HSE Management Standards or ISO 45003. Neither is a certification scheme, so treat any supplier who says otherwise with care.

PRC is not a clinical service, and the disclosures and every email say so. It does not diagnose, treat or refer. Anyone who raises a clinical concern is pointed to their GP or NHS 111, as question three sets out. Your EAP and Occupational Health carry on exactly as now.

Nothing about any person reaches you. So PRC creates no new knowledge about an individual that you would then be expected to act on. Your duties to each employee stay where they are today: with their manager, HR and Occupational Health. PRC adds a route alongside them. It takes none of them over.

Taking part is voluntary and open to everyone. Nobody is chosen for it, and nobody at your organisation can see who joined. Read the full scope statement before you decide: prcworkforce.com/disclosures.html.

You are buying from one person, and this page should say so plainly. PRC Workforce is run by Jon Cull. There is no account manager and no sales team. The person on the call is the person who sends your invitation and writes your report.

What that means if something happens to Jon. The 90-day protocol runs from a fixed, automated email sequence. Once it starts, nothing in it depends on anyone sending an email by hand. The Usage Audit report is built by a script that applies the reporting floor on its own.

What your procurement team can have before the call: the two-page audit agreement, the data terms, the full question set, the specimen report and the disclosures. Fixed, published prices. No VAT is charged. The invoice is raised on signature and paid within 14 days. There is no platform to security-test, no single sign-on and nothing to integrate.

Expect the question. The design answers it. Every audit question is sent to you before you sign, so reps can read all twenty four before anything goes out. Nobody types anything. No name or email address is asked for or held. There is no breakdown by department, site or team, and nothing at all is printed below thirty replies.

Show the reps first. Send them the questions and the specimen report before the invitation goes. Jon will brief them on a call if you want him to. A survey the reps have read in advance is hard to call surveillance, and showing it to them is part of involving staff in your stress risk assessment, which HSE expects anyway.

The protocol works the same way. Nobody at your organisation can see who joined, and there is no route to ask.

No. For the audit, PRC never receives a list of staff and never holds a work email address. Your organisation sends the invitation itself, once, to everybody, in the same way: an all-staff email, plus the intranet or any notice you already use. Each carries the same short link. Everybody gets the same message, so receiving it tells nobody anything.

Staff are asked to answer on their own phone, on mobile data, not on a work computer or the work Wi-Fi. That keeps even the visit to the form off your network. Everyone answers through the same link, with no login and nothing to type. No name and no email address is asked for at any point.

The two reminders go out the same way, from you, on dates agreed before it opens. The number printed as invited on the report is the headcount you tell us the invitation reached, not a list of people. For the 90-day protocol, question nine applies: people join with their own personal email address, which they give us themselves.

Most usage figures an employer sees come from the provider whose service is being judged. Each provider decides what counts as use, so two reports can describe the same staff in different ways. That is true of every scheme of this kind, not one in particular.

PRC Workforce takes no fee and no commission from any provider of staff support. Not from an EAP, an insurer, a helpline or an app. The audit asks your own staff. The report ranks the fixes cheapest first, and it recommends no PRC product.

If a broker introduced you, PRC pays the broker out of the fee you pay. No provider pays PRC anything.

Two limits, stated plainly. PRC sells its own 90-day programme, so independent here means independent of the providers you already pay, not independent of PRC. And a staff-side count is not the same measure as a provider's report. One counts what staff say about the last twelve months. The other counts contacts the provider logged. Read them side by side, not as two answers to one question.

Keep Britain Working is the government's programme, run with employers, to keep more people in work. Its June 2026 update says people fall into the gaps between HR, EAPs and occupational health. It says there is little data on people while they are still in work. And it says a trusted intermediary should collect that data, with employers seeing group figures only.

The audit already works that way. It asks about every kind of support on offer, it asks people who are still at work, and you see group figures only.

BSI is writing a national standard to put the programme into practice. A draft for public comment is expected in early 2027. A figure you hold before then gives you a starting point to measure against.

PRC Workforce is not part of the programme and is not endorsed by it. The audit is not the government's planned work and health check. It follows the same principle.