9 Employee Wellbeing Metrics to Track Right Now
Employee wellbeing metrics are data that help you assess the state of employee wellbeing at your organization and/or the success of an employee wellbeing program.
In the past, employee programs would focus on wellness, specifically on lifestyle management and physical fitness activities, like quitting smoking, regular exercise, and a healthy diet. Organizations would focus on these activities because they’re quantifiable and are known to reduce health care spending.
Measuring employee wellbeing gives you the data you need to assess the success of your wellbeing initiative and overall state of wellbeing, identify negative trends, and change them quickly.
Bear in mind that you might be dealing with sensitive data related to employee health. That’s why you need to review relevant privacy regulations when collecting employee data, and make sure you’re handling the data in a compliant way.
Here are the key metrics you need in your company.
1. Utilization and program uptake
Utilization is the number of people who accessed your wellness program, while program uptake is a summary of program participation over a certain period. These metrics can help you see how the program is being adopted and what challenges prevent employee access. You can typically collect the data from your wellness program platform.
2. Communication and awareness
As we’ve mentioned above, as many as 4 in 10 employees are unaware of their employer’s wellbeing and wellness programs. That’s why it’s important to track the frequency and open rates of your communications around your wellbeing initiatives. Measuring how well you communicate about your wellbeing programs and what employees think about them will help you create better strategies to showcase the value of the programs.
3. Employee satisfaction
The best way to know how someone is feeling is by asking them. Throughout your wellness program, send out anonymous surveys that rate stress levels, workloads, and happiness on a scale of 1-10. You can also ask them how satisfied they are with the services they’re getting through your wellbeing program.
4. Employee turnover
Organizations that apply wellbeing best practices have 11 percentage points lower turnover than organizations doing little in terms of employee wellbeing.
Tracking the changes in employee turnover helps you estimate the impact of your wellbeing initiatives. You can compare your employee turnover data with previous periods, or to industry benchmarks.
5. Changes in absenteeism and annual healthcare costs per employee
Examine the total amount of absenteeism and healthcare costs before and after implementing a new wellbeing initiative. For example, if you adopt mental health software for your workplace mental health program, track the changes in absenteeism rate and healthcare costs to assess its impact over time.
While adding more initiatives adds to your costs, 78% of employees miss work or go on leave due to mental health.
6. Financial results
If you want to assess how investing into a wellbeing program impacts your organization financially, you should look into how much savings the improvements in employee wellbeing translate to. As we’ve already mentioned, you can see how much you’re saving on disability insurance costs.
7. Demographics
The demographics metric summarizes active program participants based on gender, age, sexual orientation, and more. This helps you understand if certain groups face barriers in getting the help they need. For example, some people might not make use of a mental health program because they have a language barrier and there’s a lack of mental healthcare providers who speak their language.
8. Symptom severity
Take the currency status of your employees based on medical records (consensually provided) and surveys and compare them quarterly.
Let’s say that you want to understand how your new mental health offering is helping your employees deal with stress, which you’ve previously identified as an issue. Emotional symptoms of stress include moodiness, being unable to switch off, and feelings of frustration, agitation, and being overwhelmed.
9. Time to service
This metric tracks how much time it takes from the moment an employee requests help within your wellbeing program to when they receive the services they need. Time to service is especially relevant for mental health services.
Tracking this metric doesn’t only help you look for ways to keep your wait times reasonable, but it also allows you to manage employee expectations about how long it takes to receive the required help.
Employee wellbeing metrics rely on surveys, active listening, and empathy. It’s often difficult, or even impossible, to stay on top of employee wellbeing with raw numbers alone; you need to actively speak to your employees to understand what they need. Employee wellbeing depends on it.
References:
https://www.aihr.com/blog/employee-wellbeing-metrics/