Over the last 5 years I have witnessed many organisations investing in benefits and wellbeing solutions without actually identifying the challenges their employees face or indeed which employees actually face challenges. We have all seen the mental health statistics of ‘1 in 4 experience mental health issues’ and seen reports of ‘up to 60% of employees experiencing sleep issues’, but are investments in mental health first aiders or sleep advice really working? Do these solutions work for all those that are suffering?

With vast sums now invested in wellbeing solutions do we really understand whether these investments are paying off or indeed whether employees are even aware that some of these services/solutions are available to them? It’s time to start measuring, managing and reporting individual employee wellbeing if we really want to improve it; after all what gets measured gets managed and blindly spending money on possible solutions isn’t the answer. COVID panic stations are over, it’s time to start approaching wellbeing in a measured way.

At KAYA we have developed an employee wellbeing experience solution that allows organisations to measure, report and manage workplace wellbeing at the individual level, without being overly intrusive. Employees, teams and organisations get a score which they can track and demonstrate wellbeing is improving. We think that’s pretty cool, however the real power in the system comes from a set of academically researched questions designed to tease out wellbeing challenges and what is needed to improve individual wellbeing. Our surveys take less than 5 minutes to complete and organisations can baseline their wellbeing in a matter of days. 

We use the workplace wellbeing experience as the lens through which we assess an employees overall wellbeing. It works extremely well as the relationship between an employee and their role, their manager and their organisation are key to workplace and overall wellbeing. Using Seligman’s PERMA model we describe how positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaningfulness and achievements impact an employees wellbeing and our proprietary algorithm provides the overall wellbeing score. This is tracked over time and against wellbeing investments to demonstrate improvements and the real return on wellbeing.

If you want to improve wellbeing we believe you need to do four things:

Encourage and create space for wellbeing reflection – Employees must be encouraged and supported to address their wellbeing challenges, but also given the space to do so. If they don’t want to help themselves it’s going to be very difficult to help them. Our Wellbeing Management System allows employees to anonymously review their wellbeing and if needed ask for help.

Challenge the challenges – It’s not just about identifying challenges you have to get to the root causes. Wellbeing challenges can have a broad range of causes, simply investing in a mental health app might not be the answer for all mental health issues. Our Wellbeing Management System teases out the root causes of poor wellbeing and directs employees to the right resources to help them. These can be articles, videos or specialist they can speak to.

Sustained support – Wellbeing challenges come along all the time so help needs to be available constantly. You have to put in place appropriate solutions to address wellbeing challenges based on a SELF help, SUPPORTED help and SUSTAINED help approach. Not everyone wants to talk to others about their challenges and are happy to work on them on their own, our Wellbeing Management System has a range of help resources to support employee Financial, Mental, Physical, Social and Societal wellbeing.

Measure success relentlessly – Track and report progress against investments and overall wellbeing levels. What gets measured gets managed. Our Wellbeing Management System reports wellbeing every time you run a survey showing you how well your workforce is, as well as showing you the differences across teams, departments and between new, departed and loyal staff. We’d suggest quarterly but we know some clients want to make this a monthly event. Making wellbeing a habit is key. 

If you would like more information on the KAYA Wellbeing Management System, access to a free company baseline survey or to discuss your current wellbeing strategy please drop me an email lee@mywellbeingindex.co.uk