What gets measured, gets managed. Usually spoken with such authority we all immediately believe it to be true, because it makes sense and, well, sounds clever. 

In my experience most things that are being measured aren’t being managed. Last year I spoke to a business leader with attrition of more than 30%, in a pandemic year with minimal job liquidity. It had simply been factored in as a cost of doing business. Not managed. 

Most HR tech solutions have low engagement rates. One popular meditation app celebrates that 5% of team members signed up will go on to use it. As people professionals we’ve become accustomed to these results, but what are the other 95% doing? Not managed. 

While I could go on, this is not the post to point out that we’re not managing what we measure, although that may come later. This is simply about the measuring bit. 

As a critical strategic function, it’s imperative that we as people (and wellbeing) professionals are able to contribute to commercial conversations in a meaningful way. Headline people statistics (attrition, liabilities, engagement etc) are meaningless without the ability to add the colour and insight necessary to build a successful people and culture strategy. 

At BetterSpace we’re on a mission to fix this. Measuring, understanding and improving the wellbeing of your team creates happier and healthier employees, who are more productive and less likely to take sick leave or exit the business. Or for all you maths nerds:

Better Wellbeing = Happier Employees = Better Productivity. 

Here are four ways we can help:

1. Track Wellbeing

We use the Six Pillars of Wellbeing as a framework to measure and understand the wellbeing of our employees, and track changes over time (fully anonymised, of course). Wellbeing on it’s own is a nebulous concept. Being able to understand if your team is getting enough sleep, having regular social interactions, or has a meaningful activity or hobby in their life, gives us the opportunity to provide meaningful support where it’s needed most.  

In moving away from vague conversations like “how are you feeling?” to “talk to me about your pillars,” we can be more impactful leaders and find the solutions to build a happier and more productive workforce.

2. Understand Engagement

Most software solutions employed in the workplace get single digit engagement (that is, monthly active users). We’ve come to accept it’s the norm and factor it in to our decision making process. 

At BetterSpace, not only can we measure engagement with our own platform, we can also help you understand how your existing wellbeing benefits are being used, or not. By creating a central wellbeing hub we give you a single dashboard from which to track usage, and help you make better decisions about where to spend your precious budget for the greatest return.

3. Optimise Your Budget

The problem with enterprise licence agreements is that you pay for 100% of team members to access a product that only a small proportion will actually use. 

You may rationalise this by saying something like “but we negotiated a 50% discount off the standard price,” so let’s do some maths: 

Let’s say you have 5,000 employees, and have signed up to a popular wellbeing solution at an annual cost of  £60 per person per year – half the standard price. You’re spending £300,000, but have also saved £300,000 (hooray!) through being a savvy negotiator. 

Most solutions get single digit engagement rates, but I’ll be generous and say 10% of your team engage with the solution for the sake of the example. 

So, if 500 of your employees use the solution, which is costing £300,000 per year, you’ve actually paid £600 per person, or five times the retail price. 

Suddenly that discount you negotiated doesn’t look so good. 

Our marketplace model ensures you only pay for what is used. 

Even at full retail price (and we usually have a similar discount), engaging the same supplier through BetterSpace would save you £240,000.

Your CFO will love you forever.

4. Provide the Best Resources

If you’ve been investing in the wellbeing of your team for a while, you’ve probably been “picking winners.” This is the phenomenon where every year or so you subscribe to a new solution, over time layering them all up and hoping that the next one is the holy grail. 

While you’re layering up new resources, we normally see what we call “the law of diminishing returns,” where each new resource gets less engagement. After all, your team has seen it all before, and they tune out. 

By bringing each of these resources together into BetterSpace we provide a central point for your team to access the best wellbeing solution for them. It may be one of yours, or it may be from the more than 400 resources available on the platform. 

Using employee feedback and utilisation data we continually refine the solutions available, ensuring that only the most popular and most effective resources are available to your team.

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So here’s the bottom line. Better wellbeing makes for happier employees, which makes for more productive employees. It’s also the right thing to do. 

At BetterSpace, we give you the framework and data to ensure you’re building the highest impact wellbeing programme possible.