FTSE companies that prioritize wellbeing and engagement outperform others by 10 percent according to a study from SOMA Analytics. Similar results are apparent across a range of related studies. With such a significant impact, it’s surprising that businesses are still not measuring the impact of wellbeing activities to optimize their offering.

If you don’t know how effective wellbeing activities are, how can you justify the spend to decision-makers? The issue for many employers and HR professionals is, measuring wellbeing is an unknown entity, it’s difficult to know where to start. Booking in a few activities and hearing how employees ‘loved it’ might tick boxes and make everybody feel good, but to know the long-term impact, and to make the case for wellbeing to senior gate-keepers, you need reliable data and you need to know what to do with it.

According to a CIPD report from last year, two-thirds of companies say impact evaluation is important in the development of wellbeing programs but only 22 percent critically assess the quality of wellbeing outcomes. There is a gap between what companies say and what they actually do when it comes to wellbeing.

Meaningful measurement keeps you and the budget holders fully informed about what works, and what doesn’t. It enables you to make evidence-based decisions to develop an effective wellbeing strategy and empowers you to maximize the return on your investment.

Wellbeing goals can be aligned with the goals of the organization. The metrics you choose to measure will be those that are most important to your business.

Getting it right

So, what about the companies that do get strategic and measure wellbeing; how do they do it? Is it worth it? Yes. According to the CIPD: “organizations that critically evaluate the impact of wellbeing, particularly those that take a feedback loop approach, are much more likely to report positive outcomes”.

What does ‘good, bad and ugly’ of wellbeing measurement look like in today’s workplace?