Will Wellness be the New Metric Companies use to Understand Employees?

Employers know that workplace health is critical. The question is how healthy is your wokrforce? Taking a measure of employee wellness is becoming the newest metric to understand employee populations at large. 

Did you know that 8.4 percent of employees left their job in 2018 for wellness reasons?

The most important thing to a company isn’t a low turnover rate or high productivity; it’s having happy employees. Happy employees are less likely to leave, they’re more likely to stay focused, and they’re more likely to be productive.

That's one of the many reasons that wellness is the metric all companies will be looking at in the future. But, how do you keep your employees well and measure that metric?

Keep reading to learn more about corporate wellness programs and innovative solutions for your organization.

The Benefits of Wellness Programs

In short, wellness programs help promote a healthy lifestyle. They encourage better eating and sleeping habits, promote exercise, help reduce stress and anxiety, and more. Because of that, wellness programs provide a few key benefits to employers.

Employee Retention

The cost of turnover when employees leave your company can be high. However, companies that have a well-developed wellness program can reduce that rate.

Companies with strong wellness programs have a turnover rate of about 9 percent. Compare this to companies without robust programs that have a turnover rate of 15 percent.

Reduce Absenteeism

In addition to reducing turnover, wellness programs can also reduce time lost from work due to sickness. When your employees have a wellness program to encourage them to stay healthy, they’re less likely to be out sick. Therefore, they’re less likely to miss work. This is significant when you consider the fact that sick days cost employers around 3,900 dollars per employee in 2019.

Wellness programs that incorporate health risk assessments have a higher chance of detecting early or current risk factors affecting your employee population. High-risk areas of employees' health and well-being can be addressed with preventative wellness programming.

Increase Productivity

Employee productivity is something that every company wants to increase. A wellness program can help you achieve that.

When employees are healthy and happy, they’re 13 percent more likely to be productive. In addition, wellness programs don’t just affect productivity at work. They affect work-life balance and productivity at home. Better employee health means less stress, less anxiety, and less absence from work. In turn, that means that your employees are happier at home. They have more energy and more time to take care of themselves and their families.

Decrease Employee Stress and Burnout

If you have employees who are stressed out, burnout is also a concern. These types of programs can help you keep your employees from burning out, which will allow them to be more productive than ever.

How do You Hone Your Wellness Program Using Metrics

Obviously, wellness programs can provide a plethora of benefits. But, how do you track and manage your program?

Wellness programs can be difficult to manage. They can also be difficult to measure. 

How do you use current metrics to improve a wellness program? Here’s how.

Understand What Metrics to Track

First, you need to understand your current metrics. What are good metrics to track? What are the metrics that are bad?

For example, some companies focus on physical activity and weight, but the BMI measurements are problematic. A BMI measurement can tell you if you’re underweight, normal weight, overweight, or obese, but it doesn’t actually measure health.

If your goal is to encourage fitness in your employees, tracking fitness and weight alone isn’t going to help you. You need to measure health, not BMI.

Some metrics are also difficult to track.

For instance, stress may be difficult to measure over time without a validated tool and a re-assessment. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad metric to track. It’s more complex than you might think.

For example, there are two categories of stress, short-term stress and long-term stress. You might be measuring short-term stress, but what about long-term stress? Since it’s not possible to measure stress directly, you have to know what to look for in indirect measurements.

For example, if employees are getting sick more often or if they’re reporting a higher amount of illness, this may be a red flag that your program isn’t working as intended.

Implement a System that Helps Track Metrics

Now that you know what metrics to track, you need to implement a system that allows you to measure wellness. The best way to do this is to track the progress of changes that employees are making.

What changes are they making? Are employees reporting less stress? Are they getting sick less often?

If you don’t understand how your wellness program is making changes, you won’t understand what’s working.

Luckily, wellness technology tools and platforms keep track of these changes. From engagement metrics, coaching program enrollment, the number of scheduled biometrics screenings, complete vs. incomplete health assessments, to the number of steps taken across your organization, a wellness program keeps track of all of your employee health data - easily accessible with business intelligence reporting. 

Use the Data to Improve Your Program

Finally, you should use the data to improve your program. If you’re not seeing the results that you hoped for, you need to make changes.

For example, if you’re not seeing a decrease in stress, you might change your focus from physical activity to stress reduction. Data reporting from routine health assessments will help to pinpoint employees' health changes compared to the previous assessment period. These changes over time should be reflective of the wellness programming offered to employees. 

Wellness is the Metric That Creates a Better Workplace

Wellness programs provide a variety of benefits. However, at the end of the day, how do you implement a program and track whether or not it's working? If wellness is the metric that creates a better workplace, you need a solution that is sure to measure the holistic health of your employees over time. 

CoreHealth cares about your future and the future of your employees. Let us help you not only implement an effective wellness program but track the metrics that matter. Reach out to our team today to find out why our wellness platform is the right solution for you. 

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