Making Employee Wellbeing a part of your KPIs
Did you know that 3 out of 5 workers are burned out on the job. Even in personal life, factors such as social media, relationships, and illnesses induce stress. As employees combat stress in personal as well as professional life, it becomes important for employers to take their wellbeing seriously.
What are KPIs?
KPI refers to Key Performance Indicators. It is a performance metric that measures specific goals that are of key importance to the organisation.
Each functional department of business has a separate set of KPIs. For instance, Marketing department would have Customer Acquisition Cost and Audience engagement as KPI. As the article is focused towards HR, here are some common HR related KPIs:
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
It measures the likelihood of your employees health to recommend others for working at your organisation. Highly satisfied employees are more likely to recommend you to others. To measure NPS, ‘Range’ based questions can be asked to employees. For instance “On a scale of 0-10 how likely are you willing to recommend us to your colleagues”
2. Turnover Rate
It measures the percentage of your employees leaving the organisation. More turnover rate is bad for business.
3. Absenteeism Rate
It is calculated by comparing the number of days in which the employee was absent to the total number of working days. Higher absenteeism reflects the unwillingness of employees to work at the organisation.
Why Employee Wellbeing is crucial for an organisation?
If the organisation looks after the employee wellbeing, they will rank better at the KPIs shared above. Happy employees would recommend the organisation (High NPS), show up more (low absenteeism) and stay for a long term period (lower turnover rate).
Thus maintaining employee wellbeing is a crucial KPI for an organisation, there are employee wellbeing programs that can help too.
Measures of wellbeing
Selecting what measures should form the basis of a wellbeing KPI can prove challenging.
A workplace could attempt to measure employee wellbeing directly. Given that an individual’s health and wellbeing are influenced by many factors, not just work, an organisation may understandably baulk at being held accountable for this.
However, tracking trends in wellbeing over time could still provide useful insights that would make it easier for employers to care for staff, when and where help is most needed.
Tips for successfully employing a wellbeing KPI:
Ensure heath and wellbeing are written into your workplace’s business strategy, so that the wellbeing KPI has a clear link to business goals.
Wait until you have some runs on the board with your wellbeing program before introducing a KPI. This allows you to build relationships and establish trust with staff first.
Invest in a communication strategy that explains the value of having a KPI – namely, to help the organisation fulfil its responsibility to care for staff and create a healthy work environment. Otherwise, it may be seen as a negative form of control and monitoring, and generate backlash.
Consult staff when choosing KPI measures.
Make the KPIs realistic, particularly for time-poor middle managers.
If collecting personal wellbeing data, ensuring privacy and anonymity are paramount.
Don’t look at the results in isolation. Investigate low wellbeing KPI hotspots to help identify causes in order to offer targeted support.
If the same wellbeing KPI is to be applied equally across the organisation, all staff need to have equal access to the wellbeing programs and services.
Conclusion
Gone are the days when Salary was the only key factor to attract employees. Now employees also look for factors such as work environment and company culture, that’s why company review platforms such as Glassdoor have gained popularity.
Investing in employee wellbeing is a crucial KPI for any business because happier employees not only deliver better results, but also act as ambassadors to promote the organisation.
References:
https://www.peoplehum.com/blog/making-employee-wellbeing-a-part-of-your-kpis
https://intheblack.cpaaustralia.com.au/work-life/adopt-staff-wellbeing-as-a-kpi