What's the Best Way to Measure Employee Wellness? 6 Key Performance Indicators

If you want to build a healthy company, start by taking care of your employees.

In 2022, employee wellness soared into an $18 billion industry, a 157% increase in just two years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines employee wellness programs as events, resources, and services companies provide to their employees.

But does employee wellness really impact your company's bottom line? According to recent research by Gallup, the answer is yes. Neglecting employee wellness contributes to:

• $322 billion of global turnover and lost productivity
• $20 million of lost opportunities for every 10,000 workers
• 15-20% of total payroll due to burnout-related voluntary turnover

To avoid these negative outcomes, building a successful employee wellness program is critical. You can—and should—use key performance indicators (KPIs) to promote work satisfaction and employee wellness. Read on to learn how to begin gathering data and which employee wellness KPIs matter most.

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The Benefits of an Employee Wellness Program

Prioritizing employee wellness creates a positive workplace culture and reinforces employee satisfaction and loyalty. By creating a healthy work environment, you are maximizing your company’s potential. Your company will have better employee retention and improve productivity. This will improve sales and overall customer satisfaction.

Key focus areas include:

• Employee satisfaction: How happy are your employees with their position in your company?
• Employee Retention: How likely is it that employees will stay with your company long-term?
• Employee Motivation: How driven and invested are your employees?
• Management Satisfaction: How satisfied are your employees with your management style?
• Peer Satisfaction: How satisfied are employees with their coworkers?
• Work Environment: How happy are employees with their work environment?

If your employees rate your company highly in each of these areas, your company has the best chance of running smoothly and efficiently. An employee who feels happy in their positions will be working their hardest to make sure your company succeeds.

The Top 6 KPIs That Measure Employee Wellbeing

1. Employee Satisfaction

This indicates how happy your employees are working at your company, and whether or not they are satisfied with their position in the company. This section will discuss how you can make use of Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) and Employee Satisfaction Surveys to calculate employee satisfaction.

The eNPS allows employers to measure employee’s willingness to be brand ambassadors by advocating employment with the company. Through this method, you can segment employees into promoters, passives, and detractors.

To do this, you ask variations of the question: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely is it that you would recommend this company as a place to work?”. Then, you can categorize your employees as follows:

• Promoters: These are the employees that answered an average of 9-10. They are the most loyal segment of your company.
• Passives: These are the employees that answered an average of 6-8. They are not necessarily negative contributors, but not entirely loyal.
• Detractors: The employees that answered 0-5. These employees are not likely to be ambassadors for your company. If you have these employees, you must know why.

Your eNPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Passives do not affect your score. You should also monitor your scores over time. These questions should be asked on a regular schedule so you can see improvements or setbacks over time. It may be helpful to use project management software to keep a set schedule and delegate tasks.

The eNPS can also be combined with additional surveys throughout the year. Ask your employees for their feedback. Consider overall work satisfaction with specific aspects of their work life. Ask employees if they feel valued for their contributions. Also, see if they feel like you are taking adequate action to promote wellness within the company.

While these answers must be anonymous to gather honest feedback, you can follow up with a team meeting. This is a great way to share your eNPS and brainstorm ideas on how to improve it. This should be done in a way that promotes solutions, and doesn’t dwell on problems.

2. Employee Retention

Employee retention refers to how likely your employees are willing to continue working in your company. The Center for American Progress study showed that businesses spend about one-fifth of a salary to replace that employee. Employees not registered for a well-being program are four times more likely to leave the company. This means companies must make wellness resources easily accessible for their employees.

The link between employee wellness and retention cannot be ignored. It is something that can cost your company money and precious time. One way to improve employee wellness and retention is to promote effective communication. This section will give tips on how to effectively communicate with employees to increase employee retention.

Offer Weekly Brainstorm Sessions

Make your employees active participants in company policies and procedures. Ask them what can be done to make the company a better place to work. For example, if you provide call centers customer service, make sure your representatives have a voice. Providing excellent customer service can be demanding for employees. Nobody knows how to improve health and wellness for representatives more than the employees themselves.

Provide Peer-to-Peer Platforms

Isolation is a significant factor in why workers do not stay with a company. You need to provide your employees with the tools to connect. This will keep communication within departments and between departments. It will improve collaboration and promote cohesion within your business.

Communicate Professional Development Opportunities

Make sure your employees know that you are invested in their careers. In fact, LinkedIn found that 94% of employees would stay with their employers for longer if they knew the company was invested in them. However, you need to make sure you carve out the time in your employees’ day for additional training.

3. Employee Motivation

This refers to just how much drive your employees have to aim higher and succeed within the company, as well as just how motivated they are to see the company succeed and achieve new milestones. Employee motivation is key to your company’s success. You should promote employee wellness because this will most likely lead to a happier and more ambitious workforce.

If you have low motivation within your team, you need to recognize it. More than that, you should take steps to fix it. This section will include tips on recognizing low employee motivation and ways to boost them.

Signs of Low Motivation

• Decreased productivity
• Tardiness or absenteeism
• Personality or behavior changes
• Lower quality of work
• High turnover

How To Improve Motivation

• Make a personal connection. Try to make connections with your employees and treat them as individuals. The more invested you are in them, the more motivated they will be to invest in your company.
• Try gamification. Make productivity fun with gamification software. This software applies game mechanics to non-game contexts to boost engagement.
• Make them aware their skills are valued: Your employees should know that their efforts do not go unnoticed.
• Protect work-life balance. Employees who feel that they have work-life balance are more engaged and more productive. In fact, 77.5% of employees said they are engaged with their work when they feel like they have this balance. This is compared to 55.8% of employees who feel engaged when they are lacking this balance.

4. Management Satisfaction

Management satisfaction indicates how content your employees are with the management style and choices of the company. Happy employees begin with effective management. This section will give actionable tips to improve management style.

Curate Self-Awareness

Being self-aware means managers will respond better to challenges. They should know where their strengths lie and where they need to improve. For example, if managers struggle with inventory, you should look into inventory management software. Having this help will take some pressure off management. This will also ensure employees have the information they need to succeed.

Make sure management:

• Asks for feedback
• Pays attention to how employees respond to their management style
• Journals about expectations, feelings, and results in relation to how they manage

Support Further Education

Make sure your management is up to date on what is happening in business management. This also allows them to interact with other people in management to gain new perspectives.

Change Communication Styles

Try new ways to communicate. By exploring new methods, you can find new ways to be an effective communicator. Make sure your company uses data quality software to help evaluate company data. This will ensure the quality of the information you distribute to your employees. This will make your communications clear and consistent.

5. Peer Satisfaction

Peer satisfaction refers to how much your employees are satisfied with their coworkers when it comes to disposition, work ethic, and overall performance. This section will list ways to build more compatible teams to ensure peer satisfaction and a highly efficient workforce.

Make sure your employees are:

Present

Not just physically but also mentally. A present team member contributes more and is a better person to work with. They will contribute to your company’s overall wellness and be able to catch problems sooner. For example, if you have customer service calls not being directed correctly, they won’t let it go unchecked. They will identify problems in your call routing software often before management.

Decisive

You want team members who can make decisions quickly. Give your employees the agency to make independent decisions. Giving your employees the tools to be decisive will make them better teammates and better employees.

Adaptive

Try to curate an adaptive team. Make sure they can respond to changes and react intuitively to customer demands.

Honesty, Trust, and Fairness

Promote these qualities in your team. It will build healthy employee relationships and create morale in your workforce.

You should also promote a team that values mutual sharing, cooperation, and social rewards. This can be done by making sure your team has access to cloud storage. However, make sure you monitor cloud metrics to make sure you have enough storage for your company.

6. Work Environment

If your organization has a toxic environment, you must implement a culture change in your company.

The first step is identifying your current work environment. What are your employees’ thoughts on the work environment? Is it too lax or too strict? Would they describe it as a healthy working environment or a toxic one?

Toxic Work Environments

A toxic work environment creates an atmosphere of dysfunction, unhappiness, and drama. This can harm team morale and be bad for you and your employees’ health.

Warning signs of a toxic environment include:

• Employees are chronically stressed.
• There are complaints about being overworked.
• Bullying is present.
• Gossip is prevalent.
• Management is described as ‘hotheaded’.

Healthy Work Environments

A healthy work environment is one that is safe, satisfying, and empowering. It supports health and safety with all team members having a responsibility to promote wellness.

Signs of a healthy work environment include:

• There is a sense of professionalism, accountability, and transparency.
• The company promotes safety, respect, and openness.
• Your team members feel empowered.
• Employees have flexibility in their work.
• Your company offers rewards, incentives, and benefits that help promote wellness.

Creating a healthy work environment should be a priority in your business. This may also include giving your team the tools they need to make their work more efficient. In your call centers, this may include providing your representatives with tech. For example, excellent call transfer software may help streamline your customer service representatives’ duties. It provides interactive voice response to direct calls. They will have more time to interact with team members and lessen their workload.

Next Steps: Start Measuring Employee Wellness KPIs Today

Knowing the right KPIs to look at when evaluating employee wellness is key to assuring that your employees can work under optimal conditions. This allows them to work efficiently and maximize productivity, giving your company more room to grow and avoid stagnation. By making employee wellness a priority, you are also ensuring the wellness and longevity of your business.

About the Author

Richard Conn is the Senior Director, Search Marketing for RingCentral, a global leader in unified communications and omnichannel contact center solutions. He is passionate about connecting businesses and customers and has experience working with Fortune 500 companies such as Google, Experian, Target, Nordstrom, Kayak, Hilton, and Kia. Richard has written for sites such as Cincopa and Multibriefs.