Many organisations are moving into the world of AI and Predictive Analytics in relation to their own areas of expertise, manufacturing, logistics, finance, retail, healthcare and many others are using data analytics to predict stock levels, vehicle tolerances or market trends.
The Health & Wellbeing Industry has lagged behind historically in this space, lots of well-meaning service providers have provided services to organisations without really tracking, measuring, and reporting on outcomes or doing any form of impact analysis.
This has meant that we have seen many organisations with lots of siloed wellbeing initiatives running that have low engagement and are often not addressing the day-to-day issues their colleagues are facing that inevitably lead to poor physical and mental health, higher absence and presenteeism levels, more grievance and litigation cases and ultimately lower productivity and higher employee attrition.
It is time for the industry to mature and help organisations get the fundamentals right first, laying the foundations for true data insights and predictive modelling, focusing on the ever-changing needs of employees, and getting ahead of reactive initiatives to provide truly preventative wellbeing strategies.
Surveys and questionnaires have their place in the jigsaw that is wellbeing, providing hot spot areas, current cultural moods, and additional context but they are very quickly out of date, the “so what” data to help the industry move the dial forward is the real time absence, risk and attrition data.
When this is collected accurately with the same processes and procedures across an organisation, also understanding its hierarchy structure, geographic locations, divisions, departments, teams, employee age, gender, ethnicity, and roles, all in real time, you can start to build a picture of the needs of employees and in turn the health of your workforce.
If you have a large and accurate enough database over many years where data collection methods have always remained the same, you have a veritable pot of gold. Such rich and accurate data means predictive analytics and AI can very accurately forward model health & wellbeing trends based on the changing environments in a workplace, a very accurate adaptive wellbeing strategy can be modelled and finally the link between health & wellbeing and productivity, engagement, P&L and cultural fitness can be built.
If you then build a platform which enables employers to plug in their current wellbeing initiatives and then track their effectiveness in line with the real time organisational health & wellbeing metrics and trends, it will give a clear steer on where focus is needed from HR, operations, finance and the Exec and directly link the effectiveness of the services being provided to the outcomes and the positive or negative impact can be measured so provisions and budgets can be adjusted.
This way of working is possible when you collect data at the front end on a day-to-day basis about the on-going health a wellbeing of your colleagues. A focused and adaptive wellbeing strategy that clearly shows the links between increased and more focused wellbeing spend and the positive uplift in moral, productivity and profitability is a game changer in terms of the perception and importance of employee wellbeing on the C-Suites radar.
The quirk of this story is the absence management piece. That necessity for employees to report their absence to their employer is by happenstance, the gateway to high employee engagement, accurate and detailed data (when collected in a standardised format across an organisation) and performance is the net result of an organisations good or bad processes, procedures, and culture.
The health & wellbeing industry can help itself and clients here. By working together on a health & wellbeing index that is driven by accurate data, it can model what good looks like for organisations in terms of employee health & wellbeing, this can be based on engagement levels, outputs and impact scores, spend and return on investment, employee absence levels and many factors that feed into a scoring out of 100 for instance.
If providers sign up to the index and ask clients to sign up as well, the industry will show its expertise and value for money. This is important and allows for the loftier goals of good employee engagement, better employee mental and physical health, more support for families and the community and a real story to tell in terms of DE&I and the S in ESG.
Good Health & wellbeing is the most important thing in yours and your families lives.
Time for us all to step up and move the conversation forward.
