This month, Juno CEO and Founder, Ally Fekaiki joined Liam Martin from Running Remote to discuss how to quantify employee wellbeing, which metrics to use to measure employee wellbeing, and where organisations might be going wrong when quantifying employee wellbeing.

Couldn’t make it on the day or want to relive the conversation? Watch the recording of the Running Remote X Juno webinar here.

This article will cover the insights shared on the webinar, further exploring the topic of quantifying employee wellbeing.

Download our free guide on how to measure employee wellbeing.

‍Why Is Employee Wellbeing So Important For Your Company?

“As an organisation, looking after your employees in ways that combat burnout, improve work-life balance, and consider how people are working will improve your retention, it will improve people’s productivity. “ - Ally Fekaiki, CEO of Juno

However, these things are not just “nice to haves” on your company culture’s checklist, it’s actually vital and here’s why: since 76% of employees (as found in our Workplace Culture Study) said that they consider leaving their jobs due to poor workplace culture, if you are not focusing on providing a healthier workplace, your retention rate will decrease significantly and you won’t be attracting the best talent.

What Do Employees Expect When Applying For A New Role [or] From Their Employer?

‍

3 out of 4 employees want to work for organisations acting ethically within the workplace and supporting the happiness, health, and wellbeing of their teams.

There has been a lot of focus on what Gen-Z want from companies recently, since they are the future of work. What they’re looking for is part of a bigger trend that centres around a huge shift in workplace culture and employment in general.

“Gen-Z is really just a sample size of a trend that is spanning across the generations: it’s not just the twenty-year-olds, it’s everybody: people are prioritising employee wellbeing when they’re looking at jobs. They’re thinking, “I want to work hard, I want to work on something that’s mission-driven, I want to work in a rocketship but I want to have a work-life balance, I’m not going to work 16 hours a day, I want companies that prioritise my health and happiness, I want to make sure I’m not going to be in a toxic environment and I’m not burnt out”.

- Ally Fekaiki, CEO of Juno

‍

These are things that for the first time in the post-industrialized era people are willing to walk away from jobs because they’re prioritising their wellbeing and happiness.

What Are The Pitfalls of Measuring Employee Wellbeing?

One of the main reasons why so many companies don’t prioritise employee wellbeing is because they assume it’s difficult to quantify the effectiveness of employee wellbeing benefits and incentives and therefore it may be seen as difficult to justify the investment in it.

In fact, 70% of HR managers found that the difficulty of quantifying the investment of employee wellbeing was one of the main blockers in getting their wellbeing budgets accepted. Additionally, once they did implement employee wellbeing benefits it was difficult to measure the effectiveness of these programs.

“The issue with measuring employee wellbeing is that most of these companies attempt to measure it with vanity metrics and lagging indicators.

For example, they will look for figures like, “for every $1 in wellbeing invested, get $4 in productivity”, or “companies that invest in wellbeing see 70% fewer absence days”. The problem with this is that it’s not only a difficult thing to actually quantify with data, but it also can’t just be put down to employee wellbeing.

‍

Other reasons behind these metrics could be whether or not the leadership is ethical, the business health, what’s happening in the market, how much work people have, etc.”

- Ally Fekaiki, CEO of Juno

So, How Can You Actually Measure The Impact Of Employee Wellbeing Benefits?

There are definitely metrics that you can use in your organisation to quantify employee wellbeing. You can start doing this by asking questions like, “is every dollar that we’re putting into our wellbeing programme actually getting us what we want out of it?”.

‍

However, the metrics that are the most reliable and show you clearly how your employee wellbeing programme is performing are actually the ones that are the least sophisticated - they’re the ones that actually tell you how well your organisation is doing at employee wellbeing”.

- Ally Fekaiki, CEO of Juno

‍

So, how can you get this data? Here are three steps you can use to measure the effectiveness of your employee wellbeing programme.

3 Metrics You Can Use To Measure Employee Wellbeing:

1. Speak To Your Employees

The best way to measure the success of your employee wellbeing programme is by directly speaking to your employees. Whether you’re using pulse surveys or simple one-to-ones, there are specific questions that you can ask your team about their work-life balance, stress, mental health, and general wellbeing.

Here are some questions you can use in employee surveys:

• On a scale of 1-10, how stressed do you feel?
• On a scale of 1-10, how do you currently rate your workload?
• How do you relax?
• What worries you most at work right now?

2. Approval Rating of Your Wellbeing Programme

A key indicator of the success of your wellbeing programme is whether or not there’s actually engagement from your team with the products/services that you offer. For example, if you are offering things like lunch vouchers, reimbursements, subscriptions etc, but there’s very little engagement from your team, it’s clear that what you’re doing isn’t working.

So, find out, are your people actually using what you’re offering?

Here are some metrics you can track to see what the approval rating of your employee wellbeing programme is:

• Engagement Rate (quarterly utilisation rate)
• NPS (would they be disappointed if they lost it)
• How do they use it currently?

3. Productivity Vs Plans (OKRs)

Although the two points above are the clearest and most impactful ways you can measure the success of employee wellbeing in your company, you can also take a look at the productivity of your team, your business’s plans, your growth, and see how things are going when you are providing employee benefits (this is obviously useful when trialling new employee wellbeing offers or when implementing a completely new employee wellbeing programme).

Here are some metrics to track to see if productivity is increasing because of employee wellbeing:

• Performance vs Plan - is your plan moving forward as you’d like it to due to good employee performance?

• Are deadlines being tracked and are your employees hitting or missing deadlines?

• How are people rating their workloads?

‍Want To Provide Your Team With A Powerful Employee Wellbeing Programme?

As well as providing your team with endless wellbeing benefits in the most hassle-free way, we can also help you measure your employee wellbeing, since we understand how vital that is.

Here at Juno, we understand that you want to see how your team is using the platform. So, we provide you with a detailed report on your team's engagement and interests, delivered straight to your inbox as a Team Manager* - we’re gathering the data so you don’t have to!

Interested in learning more about the features of Juno and how it can provide your team with the wellbeing support they truly need? Speak to one of our Employee Wellbeing Experts.