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By Emma Attenborough-Sergeant Wellness Expert at GoVida - The Employee Wellbeing Platform

Most organisations are coming to understand the true value of workplace wellbeing strategies and the incredibly positive impact they have on the health and happiness of their teams. But this isn’t  the end of the story.

Finding the best solution for your people – one that compliments and improves company culture, acts inclusively, and helps all employees to thrive – is only possible if you keep track of progress and measure outcomes. Because if you’re not measuring workplace wellbeing, how will you know if it’s improving?

Why Measure Workplace Wellbeing?

A focus on employee wellbeing in the workplace has been shown, time and again, to improve engagement and productivity levels, increase feelings of loyalty and reduce attrition. But these efforts have to be visible, genuine, and tangible.

Measuring the state of wellbeing in your workplace, along with monitoring levels of improvement in line with the introduction of wellbeing strategies and solutions, acts as a visible indicator that you are genuinely invested in the health of your people.

These measurements will also allow you to see what’s working (so you can do more of it), and pinpoint what maybe isn’t right for your culture and your teams (so you can do less of it).

How to Measure Workplace Wellbeing

Incorporating employee wellbeing into every internal survey is a great way to take a temperature check of how your people are faring. This can be as simple as including questions that ask how an employee would rate their mental health and wellbeing, how supported they feel at work and what they’d like to see implemented to better support them.

Or, you could use the questions employed by Harvard, the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS), What Work Centre for Wellbeing, and Business in the Community (BITC), to measure subjective wellbeing:

  1. “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?”
  2. “Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?”
  3. “Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?”
  4. “Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?”

If you don’t have much budget to play with, this is a really cost-effective approach. But you will need to ask the same questions annually – or even every few months – to gauge the effect of any changes or strategies you implement. If you’re not confident in rolling out these surveys yourself, you can employ external companies to carry out focused employee surveys and to analyse and report on the results. At the very least, it can be extremely beneficial to take advice from an experienced work and health professional when it comes to selecting which drivers to track and the best methodologies for tracking.

 And if you have work-related ill health data or employee absence data available, you can use this to monitor trends over time and measure the impact of a deeper focus on wellbeing.

Measuring the Impact of Your Wellbeing Resources

As well as monitoring the mental health and wellbeing of your people, it’s also wise to regularly gather feedback on the effectiveness of any wellbeing resources you’re using. In recent years, most companies have moved away from the one-size-fits-all blanket approach to wellbeing, in recognition of the need for variety and greater personal choice. But whether it’s access to online mental health support, a fast-track to counselling, or a personalised platform like GoVida, it’s good to get an idea of what’s working and what your teams want to see more of.

For example, some of our customers love the camaraderie and inclusivity of our platform’s team challenges, while others  appreciate the breadth of our mind and meditation resources. You might also find that in cases where employees aren’t making the most of a resource, they either don’t know about it (highlighting the importance of signposting), or are struggling to make time to invest in themselves (this is where designated ‘wellbeing time’ can be transformative).

You should also examine the stressors faced by your people to pinpoint anything within your control: for instance, if you’ve switched to remote working but your teams don’t have practical home office set-ups, their wellbeing and job satisfaction can lower at an alarming rate. Affording each employee a personal allowance to create a designated office space, or to pay for a better internet connection, is a really simple way of boosting wellbeing and alleviating that particular stressor. But you’ll only know about these things – and the value of addressing them – if you assess and evaluate with purpose.

Ultimately, knowledge is power – and if you want to evidence your commitment to workplace wellbeing and see a real change to company culture, measuring and monitoring the impact of your wellbeing strategies is  crucial.

Discover how GoVida’s employee wellbeing platform can revolutionise your workplace with a free demo!

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