INTHEBLACK November 2021 - Magazine - Page 35
WELLBEING
AS A KPI
ONE OF THE SILVER LININGS OF COVID-19 HAS BEEN STAFF WELLBEING MOVING
FROM A FRINGE CONCERN FOR EMPLOYERS TO BECOMING A FOCAL POINT. IS IT
TIME FOR MORE WORKPLACES TO DEMONSTRATE THEIR STATED COMMITMENT TO
CARING FOR THEIR PEOPLE BY ADOPTING A KPI BASED ON STAFF WELLBEING?
STORY THEA O’CONNOR
W
ith the new
understanding that
employee wellbeing
is a critical factor
influencing which organisations will
survive our new uncertain normal,
many companies around the world
have made it their top concern.
As workplaces reset their norms
to adapt to different operating
conditions created by the pandemic,
now is the perfect time to bridge any
gaps between rhetoric and reality.
One way to do that is to adopt a
wellbeing key performance indicator
(KPI), reported to the board and
based on the mental and physical
health of employees.
“A wellbeing KPI is a good idea
that is picking up significant speed
right now,” says Wolf Kirsten,
co-founder of the Global Centre for
Healthy Workplaces, “but we have
a long way to go for this to become
a mainstream practice.”
Jeff Kennett, former premier of
Victoria and former chair of Beyond
Blue, has long been a proponent
of using such a measure to garner
commitment from leaders, telling
The Australian newspaper as far back
as 2016, “that will focus their minds
more than anything else”.
Leadership support is, indeed,
critical to achieving staff wellbeing.
When an organisation’s wellbeing
strategy has strong leadership
support, it is 4.2 times more likely
to report significant improvement
in employee health risks.
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.
WHAT ARE THE BEST
INDICATORS TO USE?
Kirsten points out that wellbeing
includes many dimensions – physical,
mental, emotional and spiritual –
defying definition by a single scale.
The primary goals and objectives of a
workplace’s wellbeing strategy should
help determine which of the many
metrics available would be the most
suitable.
“A KPI that many organisations
measure is employee engagement, and
engagement is very much related to
wellbeing,” he says.
Advances in artificial intelligence
(AI) and data analytics are making
it much quicker and easier to
collect information about employee
wellbeing and generate insights.
However, no matter how impressive
the AI, workers still have to be
willing to offer up their private
thoughts and feelings.
When The Data Analysis Bureau,
a UK-based data science agency
specialising in machine learning and
AI solutions, was testing its recently
released mental wellbeing index for
workplaces, it found that the biggest
challenge was allaying workers’ fears
about privacy and how the data
would be used.
“It was critical to reassure
employees that the data collected was
aggregated and anonymous, so the
organisation had no ability to identify
individuals,” says Eric Topham, The
Data Analysis Bureau’s co-founder
and CEO. “When workers learned
that the data was only accessible
intheblack.com November 2021 35