Why wellbeing needs more than an Employee Engagement Survey

Employee Engagement Surveys are great; they do lots of things very well. However, trying to understand the complex wellbeing needs of your people is not one of them.

Their core purpose is to measure the connection employees have towards their work, team, and organisation. Trying to understand mental health in the workplace by adding some questions is undoubtedly better than nothing, but not much better.

The wellbeing of your staff forms the core of how they perform - this is fact, and if you haven’t quantified this then you may be flying blind. By understanding this you will unlock the potential for breakout business performance and prove to your workforce that you are a modern compassionate employer, reaping all the benefits that that entails. However, one of the most common concerns for HR Leaders in wellbeing measurement is employee survey fatigue, which is entirely understandable.

Here are four approaches you can take that will solve this problem:

1. Make it part of your employee engagement survey process. 

Separating out wellbeing and dealing with it as an additional element important enough to have on its own will show real commitment to your people, without bringing in much extra effort. And your employees get immediate feedback, something which they complain about if the engagement piece is done on its own.

2. Make wellbeing its own thing. 

Wellbeing is important and treating it as a separate initiative can make sense if you time it with either an internal or external event such as Mental Health Awareness Week. It has a natural home and rhythm. If it has clear separation from your employee engagement survey this works even better.

3. Include as part of your onboarding & offboarding process. 

This can work well in high turnover retail or hospitality businesses. However, it also works well with a very mobile workforce where more formal levels of communication or access to technology is challenging.

4. Make it part of your annual review process. 

I don’t mean as an explicit, shared report (this will break confidentiality), however it is a natural time for the employee to be thinking about themselves and their relationship with work. Have them do the wellbeing assessment as part of the preparation and allow them to bring it into the review if they see fit.

I cannot stress enough why wellbeing treated as 4 or 5 questions as part of an employee engagement survey is just not good enough for today’s most effective businesses. It makes creating evidence to support your initiatives difficult and can be more easily manipulated by managers to support their own aims. It also does not create the richness of data needed to understand and cater for the wider needs of your team.

When you see the results a dedicated wellbeing assessment tool can provide for your employees and your company, you will never go back to the old ways of doing things. Wellbeing will become your HR north star guiding you to a happier more prosperous future.

Don’t hesitate to book a session with us if you’d like to learn more.