Employee wellbeing has risen to board-level prominence and attracted great media interest in recent years. This is not surprising: wellbeing – i.e., feeling good, authentic and meaningful in one’s working life1 – matters most to people, and drives commercial success. In response, Zilveren Kruis and Deloitte developed the Well at Work Monitor – a holistic, science-based tool designed to transform wellbeing in the workplace, founded on research by TNO.
In this article, we briefly introduce the monitor, and in the coming weeks, we’ll publish further articles on the broader issue of employee wellbeing and how it impacts business results, and share a case study illustrating the monitor’s benefits in practice.
On average, employees spend 80,000 hours of their lives working. With 60% of employees worldwide saying their job is the biggest factor influencing their mental health, workplace wellbeing is a compelling issue. Moreover, research from Gallup2 highlighted that employees who perceive their wellbeing as valued by their employers are significantly more engaged, less likely to experience burnout, and less likely to seek new jobs.
With various research demonstrating the link between employee wellbeing and business performance, it is both a cultural and commercial imperative to get this challenge right. The Well at Work monitor is the answer.
The Well at Work Monitor is an easy-to-use, science-backed measure of workplace wellbeing. The tool provides actionable insights, and facilitates targeted interventions at multiple levels within an organisation, from the individual, to the team leader/HR/divisional level, to the firmwide perspective. It is not simply a measurement tool but rather a movement towards a healthier, more engaged, and sustainably productive workplace. What’s more, as the monitor is based on a user-friendly, repeatable questionnaire, all employees can follow the development of their wellbeing over time.
The monitor was developed following five years of research by TNO, in cooperation with the Wellbeing Community – a group of leading organisations dedicated to realising sustainable improvements around wellbeing. The result is a unique tool that not only offers continuous measuring and monitoring of wellbeing, but also allows companies to share knowledge and benchmark against forward-thinking peer organisations. For anyone looking to make a real difference in their employees’ lives, the Well at Work Monitor offers a comprehensive, science-backed solution.
The research distilled the complexities of employee wellbeing into seven ‘domains’, around which the Well at Work Monitor has been built. These seven domains are the strongest indicators of wellbeing at work, and each comprises sub-domains that allow great specificity in reading the results.
The Well at Work Monitor provides insights into how employees are doing both within themselves and in relation to the work environment. These insights provide employees, teams and managers with concrete tools to start conversations and activate improvement – for example, by organising team discussion, interventions or leadership training, or by redesigning the work organisation based on employee experience and job design.
If you already implement an engagement survey, Well at Work can be used periodically as an action-oriented supplement. In time, the monitor will likely subsume and replace engagement surveys altogether. The user-friendly design of the Well at Work Monitor allows employees to track their wellbeing and compare it with their peers – with privacy being protected at all times – while leaders and HR gain aggregated insights into the team and organisation. Leadership can use the tool to focus wellbeing investment; whole organisations can use it as a catalyst for cultural transformation.
Case studies and user testimonials demonstrate that the monitor has significantly supported employees and managers in addressing wellbeing issues effectively. It has sparked meaningful conversations and strategic changes that positively impact workplace culture and employee satisfaction. For instance, at a large financial institution, the monitor helped teams increase their psychological safety by encouraging them to communicate more and spend more time together. At another, by supervising specific team dialogues based on the monitor’s findings, HR managers got better insights into the daily businesses of their (management) teams and their members. These insights, in tandem with tangible actions set out by the monitor, enabled the HR managers to implement wellbeing improvement effectively into their HR strategy at all levels of the organisation.
And this is just be beginning.
For more details on how the Well at Work Monitor can help your organisation, contact Egon Hoppe or Maureen Berkhout.
1 Niks, I. M. W., Veldhuis, G. A., Van Zwieten, M. H. J., Sluijs, T., Wiezer, N. M., & Wortelboer, H. M. (2022). Individual Workplace Well-Being Captured into a Literature- and Stakeholders-Based Causal Loop Diagram. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health/International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(15), 8925. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19158925
2 Harter, J. (2022, 18 March). Percent Who Feel Employer Cares About Their Wellbeing Plummets. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/390776/percent-feel-employer-cares-wellbeing-plummets.aspx