With Covid-19 illuminating the need for employee wellbeing and mindfulness, more and more businesses are actively measuring their employee well-being. A well workplace not only improves your employees’ health on a range of levels, but it also has major financial benefits too. And while implementing a well-being programme is important, almost just as important is measuring how effective your efforts actually are.
Measuring the effectiveness of your wellness programme shouldn’t be a one-time event either. Ideally, you should measure at regular intervals to give a more accurate read of your workplace. How often is dependent on your business, how much change is happening in your workplace be it staff turnover, process changes, cultural transformation or physically moving premises. To start with, we recommend surveying quarterly to identify your base measures.
With this in mind, here are five ways to measure employee well-being in your workplace.
Related content: The Manager's Guide to Workplace Well-being
1. A well-being survey
This can include questions such as:
- Hours worked.
- Hours of sleep: how many and how often.
- Rating physical health, activity level and hours exercised.
- Last holiday taken, how long for and when.
- Rating mental well-being.
- Describe their social/recreational life (0 outings to 5+ outings with friends/family/hobbies per week).
- How do you rate your job satisfaction?
- How do you rate your satisfaction with your career progression?
- Have you experienced high levels of worry in the last day/week?
- Have you experienced high levels of stress in the last day/week?
2. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
eNPS is a powerful metric for gauging employee experience and workplace culture in just one question:
On a scale of 0 to 10 would you recommend [your company] as a place to work to a friend or colleague?
0 is highly unlikely to recommend while 10 equals highly likely to recommend.
Employees who rank your business 0 to 6 are detractors. Those who rate 7 to 8 are passives, while 9 and 10s are promoters. To calculate your final score, minus the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. This should give you a score between -100 and 100.
When used in combination with a survey, it can help pinpoint where your workplace culture is performing well and where there’s room for improvement.
3. Employee engagement
Employee engagement and well-being go hand in hand. Generally, they’re considered reciprocal, meaning if you perform well in one metric the other will lift too as a result. While there is more than one survey to measure employee engagement, their questions typically fall into six categories:
- Role clarity
- Work quality
- Processes and procedures
- Praise and rewards
- Individual growth opportunities and training
- Working relationships.
4. Presenteeism survey
If you’re concerned about presenteeism and absenteeism in your workplace, consider including a set of presenteeism questions in your next employee satisfaction or eNPS survey.
Use your survey to ask your staff whether they feel like they are in good health—both physically and emotionally/mentally—and compare the responses to the number of days off your staff have taken. If the total number of sick days is low to none but many of your staff respond to indicate they are in poor health, presenteeism is likely an issue in your workplace.
Resource: The Stanford Presenteeism Scale
5. Leading and lagging measures
Are your staff achieving their KPIs? What about your retention figures? While these two measures don’t give direct insight into the well-being of your workplace, they can be very telling.
If staff are consistently failing to meet their KPIs it could be a sign something is not right in your workplace. From a too-high workload to poor processes and procedures, there are numerous reasons that your workplace culture is the root of the problem, particularly if you see multiple staff members not hitting their targets.
While a single resignation is not a cause for concern (it happens), multiple resignations may indicate not all is well with your employees. Reasons staff leave are many and varied, some may have had an offer too good to refuse, others might be switching careers or moving to a new region. However, staff a likely to leave in cases of workplace bullying, harassment, hazardous working conditions, poor management and burnout to name a few. To understand why your staff are leaving, hold an exit interview and listen without judgement, then seek to address any common complaints that were raised.
Help your workplace build the ability to bounce back from challenges with The Manager's Guide to Workplace Well-being.
