How to measure if your wellbeing strategy is working

A successful wellbeing strategy is more than a long list of benefits—it’s needs to be holistic, data-led, and embedded into your culture.

Leaders need to support wellbeing, but it’s vitally important that you have a top-down leadership approach to ensure it creates an environment that foresters a wellbeing culture. Remember, it shouldn’t be a strategy that sits in isolation.

But how do you measure if it’s working? You need to make sure that it’s not a strategy that sits in isolation.

How to measure if your wellbeing strategy works

Measuring wellbeing can often feel intangible, but it’s absolutely possible, and essential.  It needs to be a combination of quantitative and qualitative (data sets/ surveys & feedback) data to really get a full picture of the overall health of your people.

Start by building a measurement framework that can help you track progress, help you make informed decisions, and demonstrate the value of your wellbeing strategy to leadership.

As part of building that measurement framework it’s important to understand where you are now and where you want to get to in the future, so you can not only measure what changes you’ve been able to affect, but that it will help identify gaps in your strategy to steer you in the direction you want to go.

Organisations will choose different ways to measure their strategy but I’ll share a few ideas which may be useful to consider;

1. Employee surveys and pulse checks
Regular surveys are one of the most direct ways to understand how employees feel. You can ask about stress levels, work-life balance, access to support, and overall wellbeing. The important thing to remember when surveying is to tailor the questions to your employee base don’t just lift and shift, and then it’s what you do with the output. Make sure you are tracking trends year on year so you can look at ways adapt to your changing workforce and measure success.

2. Absence and presenteeism data
Look at sickness absence rates, especially long-term absences related to stress, anxiety, or musculoskeletal issues. Presenteeism—where employees are at work but not fully functioning—is harder to measure but can be estimated through productivity or engagement surveys.

3. Utilisation of wellbeing services
Track how often employees are using your wellbeing offerings, work with your providers to get as much data as possible, including any benchmarking data which could industry or provider specific; look specifically at EAPs data such as mental health support, financial coaching and uptake of other benefits such as gym membership and fitness programmes, etc. Low usage might indicate lack of awareness or stigma, while high usage can show demand and value.

4. Engagement and retention metrics
Wellbeing is closely linked to engagement. If your engagement scores are rising and turnover is falling, it’s a good sign your wellbeing efforts are having a positive impact.

5. Manager feedback and qualitative insights
Don’t underestimate the power of conversations. Managers are often the first to notice when someone is struggling. Encourage them to share trends and concerns and provide training so they can support their teams effectively.

6. External benchmarking
Compare your data to industry benchmarks or national averages. This helps you understand where you stand and where you can improve. This type of measurement can have an initial cost attached to it but can provide valuable insights and can create the basis of a way to ensure your strategy remains competitive.

And finally, companies that see improvements in their strategy are never static—its crucial to evolve your strategy with your people at the centre and the world around them (like we saw during the pandemic, which proved to be an extreme stress test for many strategies) so continuous assessment and measurement is key, along with adapting and future proofing your strategy.

How to keep your wellbeing strategy current

In my opinion, companies need to be ready to constantly adapt and change their wellbeing strategy in line with what’s happening at a societal level and also to remain competitive in their industry;

Some thoughts for the future;

Clear Ownership – making sure you identify key people across the organisation who own different elements of the strategy, and that the business understands what’s involved to ensure it is communicated effectively and measured over time. So having areas of responsibility is going to ensure you are more efficient and effective.

Strain on the NHS – we know as I mentioned before there is huge pressure on the NHS and employers can ease this pressure by introducing more preventative measures and implement benefits that bridge the gap between the NHS and private services i.e. Perci. Keep an eye on new and emerging digital benefits which tend be low cost, high value and accessible.

Financial pressures on budget – given the current squeeze on budgets there needs to be a focus on re-balancing on spend and maximising the existing provisions rather than introducing of whole range of new benefits that may not be fit for purpose. Putting a plaster over an issue, will not be beneficial long term or get to the root cause of an ineffective strategy.