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.

This article discusses strategies through which you can measure employee wellbeing as a KPI and use it to enhance your improved employee’s overall happiness and safety.

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What are KPIs?

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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:

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1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

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‍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”

A. Highly Loyal - Those whose score lies between 8-10

B. Neutral - Whose score lies between 6-8. They are neither negative contributors nor loyal ambassadors

C. Critics - Who score between 0-5. They are least likely to recommend you to others, it is crucial to understand why they are remorseful towards the organisation to correct the behaviour.

2. Turnover Rate

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It measures the percentage of your employees leaving the organisation. More turnover rate is bad for business.

3. Absenteeism Rate

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‍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?

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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.

How To Measure Employee Wellbeing in the workplace?

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1. Preventive Measures

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‍Physical health and wellbeing plays a vital role in the employee’s overall work performance. Tests like health screening and activity campaigns can provide an early intervention to problems which can arise later.

HRs can offer fitness tracker watches to their employees and offer incentives when they complete milestones (such as walking 10,000 steps per day).

2. Mental Health

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‍According to a study by business solver, 68% of the employees believe that discussing mental health issues with their employers can adversely affect their job security.

Mental health issues should not be taken lightly and they can do a serious toll on the overall wellbeing of an employee. The HR department should actively conduct sessions related to mental health awareness and create a congenial environment where employees can openly discuss their mental and physical health issues with employers, instead of shying away from it.

Employee Assistance Program (EAP) services can be also utilised to alleviate employees from their personal and professional problems.

3. Workplace Wellbeing Index

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‍Mind’s Workplace Wellbeing Index serves as a benchmark for best practices and policies that an organisation can adopt for assessing the overall state of their employee’s mental health and happiness.

It can bridge the gap between organisation’s approach towards mental health and safety and the actual perception of employees towards the initiative.

This index helps the organisation in two ways:

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1. Gaining recognition from the public for showing initiative towards workplace wellbeing.

2. Getting an estimate of where they stand in the index compared to other organisations who also participate in the index.

4. Employee Satisfaction

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‍This metric shows employees’ level of job satisfaction. Highly satisfied employees would reflect higher work ethic and also rank higher on Net Promoter Score (hope you remember the meaning of NPS)

Employees satisfaction surveys combines with Net Promoter Score can help employers in gauging the increases employee satisfaction.

5. Employee Retention

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‍This metric reflects how long are the employees willing to continue working for your organisation.

Training employees requires time and investment, if the employee turnover is high then it can adversely affect the financial performance of an organisation. Studies show that it costs ⅓ of a new hire’s annual salary to replace an employee

Transparency and honest communication is a key factor to foster better relationships with the employees. Following are some tips to boost employee retention:

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A. Participation in decision making: The organisation can launch weekly/monthly brainstorming sessions. This would encourage the employees to share their ideas for growth. This activity will also help with enriching the employee engagement.

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B. Learning Opportunities: Many employers shy away from spending too much on employee training with the rationale, “What if the employee leaves the organisation after I spend so much on his/her training?”

In such a scenario, retaining those employees would do more harm than good, as the lack of training would lead to poor work performance. According to a survey by linkedin, more than 90% employees vouched for staying longer at their organisation if the organisation invests in their development

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6. Sentiment Analysis

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‍Sentiment analysis helps in understanding the sentiment behind the content that is written by the employees.

This can help in understanding how the employees are responding to management style, changes and initiatives. Adequate caution should be taken while using this tactic, as it can make employees cautious of being monitored.

7. Peer Satisfaction

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‍It shows how satisfied the employees feel they are with their coworkers.

To get maximum results while working together in a team, the team members must trust each other. As they say “Team work makes the dream work”

Office politics is one of the most dreaded aspects of work culture. If the employees are in harmony with each other, they will cooperate instead of competing with each other.

8. Work Culture

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‍Nobody likes to work in a toxic work environment. To better illustrate what a toxic work environment looks like, here are some examples:

A. Employees are buried with stress levels
B. Gossiping and Absenteeism is prevalent
C. Complaints regarding high workload.

A healthy environment empowers the employees. Here is how it looks like:

A. Flexibility of work: support employees choice to remote working
B. Transparent external and internal communication without being scared of judgement
C. Incentives to reward employees for development and good performance.

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Conclusion

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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.

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About the author

Darshil Dhandh is a Marketing strategist at SmartTask. SmartTask is a project management tool that simplifies your work life balance and aims to make you 3x more productive. Awarded great user experience by Finances Online and High Performer (Fall) by G2.