Creating KPIs For Employee Health And Wellness

Canadian HR Reporter Article: March 2019By Charles Benayon

Since employees are the most valuable aspect of any business, the success of an organization is contingent upon the health and wellness of those employees.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help businesses promote employees’ wellness and work satisfaction by incorporating metrics to measure performance. If an organization wants to ensure that they are valuing the physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing of their employees, KPIs are a sustainable source for measurement, as well as for highlighting any potential areas for improvement.

KPIs are essential to establish optimal health and wellness within an organization, as well as offer a more tangible method of measuring employee satisfaction.

Exploring KPIs and Their Relation to Employee Wellness

Although typically used in business strategies, KPIs can also be used for measuring employee health and wellness. KPIs can be measured to lend value to workplace culture, employee satisfaction, and an organization’s overall success. The employees, who are the most essential component to any company’s growth, play a key role in the effectiveness of any health and wellness programs.

KPIs For Wellness

While it is advisable to ensure that all KPIs are tailored to fit a specific business’ needs, there are certain measures that should be taken in order to accurately track employee wellness. This is essential to the health, growth, and wellbeing of any organization.

Some of the key areas of focus are:

  • Employee satisfaction (how happy employees are with their positions in the company)
  • Employee retention (how likely it is that employees will remain within the company for an extended period of time)
  • Employee motivation (how driven employees are to succeed in their positions, and how personally invested they are in the overall success of the company)
  • Management satisfaction (how satisfied employees are with the management style in their company)
  • Peer satisfaction (how satisfied employees are with their coworkers)
  • Work environment (how happy employees are with their overall work environment)

All of these factors should be tracked, monitored, and re-evaluated based on employee responses. Always maintain an open door policy in regards to employee feedback so that employees will feel free to make suggestions, as well as speak to areas that they believe can be improved. This will create a better sense of overall wellness for employees and encourage open, constructive communication with Human Resources.

Choosing the Right KPIs For Employee Wellness

First, the overall objective of the KPIs needs to be established. Then, an organization must discuss their implementation and review subsequent results on either a weekly or monthly basis, depending on their performance. These KPIs must be actionable and subject to future updates, depending on their overall performance.

It’s crucial to not only develop valuable KPIs, but to establish the right ones to boost wellness programs. In order to achieve results, the organization’s values must be defined and measured in conjunction with their overall business goals. These indicators must therefore be attainable and quantifiable.

For example, if the goal is to boost employee job satisfaction by 20% by the next quarter, KPIs will help employees maintain a clearer vision of what they must set out to accomplish. This in turn helps them feel more valuable to the organization as a whole.

Improving and tracking employees’ collective sense of wellbeing is a process that requires cumulative efforts from all HR professionals. KPIs must ensure that HR professionals remain on the same page in terms of goals for both the organization, and its employees. Additionally, KPIs should give insight into further business solutions that are actionable, and reflect the flexible nature of the organization.  

How KPIs Enhance Wellbeing and Company Engagement

KPIs offer strategic insight for employees to more clearly identify and manage expectations. In regards to their performance, a KPI will help an employee to better understand what their employers expect of them. A clear direction and concise communication of goals offers employees peace of mind, reducing any potential stress and confusion related to any delegated tasks, while enhancing a sense of wellness.

For example, if the goal is to reveal how employees are responding to a change in leadership within a company, a KPI can be established for the leader to delegate tasks to each employee, before documenting their feedback to the initial direction. This will help HR professionals and employers understand how they can best enhance their employees’ sense of wellbeing, as well as manage their expectations in leadership.

In terms of tracking progress, KPIs provide an optimal basis for providing relevant feedback between HR professionals and employees. This feedback increases their level of engagement with the organization as a whole, and maintains an elevated level of enthusiasm for their job. In many ways, employees may feel that their valued contributions make them feel more like a part of the team, as opposed to a cog lost in a corporate sea.

In order to gain additional clarity to the health and wellness within an organization, a wellness tracker is a valuable option for tracking employee progress and satisfaction. It also works to create a better sense of overall employee wellness, and is a highly effective option to implement programs for the enhancement of employee wellbeing, track trends in wellness, and measure the subsequent results.

Paving the Way For Wellbeing

Above all things, the collective efforts of HR professionals must put employees on the best path towards their wellbeing. Although several factors in an organization may fluctuate in time, using KPIs to ensure workplace health and wellness will help employees realize their full potential. As a business changes, KPIs should be made to reflect any important progress in the mental health of the organization. This will help employees adjust to their new expectations, which will ultimately nurture a better confidence in their performance.

Tracking your employees’ health and wellness through KPIs provide numerous benefits by offering an inclusive, open method of communication between HR professionals and employees. By measuring employee wellness and discovering potential gaps in existing programs, HR professionals will be able to facilitate better initiatives between an organization and its employees.

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