Employee wellness program metrics: Key indicators and how to measure them
Mar 15, 2022
Employee wellness is one of the most important indicators of an organization’s productivity and longevity. When employees are healthy and feeling their best, they will feel more engaged and loyal to their workplace. Likewise, when they feel appreciated and cared for, they’re able to do their best work without interruption. In fact, studies show that employers who provide wellness programs see a six-to-one return on their investment. These benefits are crucial to creating a positive workplace culture.
But as any HR leader knows, adding wellness programs doesn’t always mean your employees will use them, and not all benefits drive the same results. To build an effective employee wellness program, it’s crucial to understand how to measure their performance. Here’s a hint — it goes deeper than utilization. In this article, we’ll discuss the key leading indicators of successful employee wellness benefits, and how you can measure them in your organization.
Employee wellness program metrics: overview
Your wellness benefits likely consists of multiple, distinct wellness programs for the different needs and phases of life of your employees. In addition to health insurance, your package may include benefits for family building and pregnancy, mental health, physical health, childcare, retirement, and more. It may also include perks like fitness reimbursements, virtual care platforms, employee financial wellness programs, or even cheap prescription drugs.
To measure success, you first need to understand how each wellness program aims to help your employees. This can include improved employee engagement, improved employee loyalty, or even improved healthcare outcomes. When you know how each program intends to help, you can measure their outcomes against your baseline. This can include metrics like participation, engagement, and utilization, but also cost savings, employee satisfaction and retention, and even healthcare outcomes.
Tracking these metrics allows you to analyze the impact of you employee wellness programs, and make data-driven decisions about what your employees want, need, and will benefit the most from.
The key metrics to measure in employee wellness
Although employee wellness benefits may target different aspects of health and wellness, there are generally five categories of metrics you can track to measure success.
1. Participation rates
The most obvious way to measure how well a wellness benefit is working is to look at how many eligible employees are actually signed up to use it. Generally speaking, if a lot of your employees are using something, it’s for a good reason. Most vendors will give you monthly or quarterly enrollment reports, especially if it’s a program where you pay per enrollment. But you can also run quarterly or annual benefits surveys and ask your employees which benefits they actually use.
2. Engagement levels
Engagement is closely related to participation. It measures how many people use a benefit on a consistent basis, and to what extent they use it over a period of time. Whereas participation may tell you someone signed up for a wellness program, engagement tells you they’re actually using it. Engagement is closely correlated to business outcomes: a recent Gartner survey found that 48% of employees who use wellness programs are considered ‘highly engaged’ in their workplace.
3. Health outcomes
Some employee wellness programs, like Maven, provide care that produces specific outcomes for people in your organization, including reducing ER visits, NICU admissions, or even C-section rates. Measuring these health outcomes usually requires some collaboration between your benefits provider, your health insurance, and your HR team. The health outcomes you track will vary depending on the service the benefit provides. For example, if you’re working with a virtual care provider, you would be looking for ways the benefit reduces hospital visits, improves access to care, or lowers healthcare costs.
Related: A leading life sciences company improves maternal health outcomes & lowers costs with Maven
4. Employee satisfaction
Employee wellness, engagement, and satisfaction are all closely linked. Measuring employee satisfaction, especially as it relates to your wellness programs, can help you identify whether your benefits are sufficient for their needs, or if there are gaps you need to fill.
When surveying your employees during benefits evaluations or open enrollment, consider asking questions abouthow satisfied and engaged your employees are. You can also ask specific questions around your wellness program offerings to help connect your investments to their happiness.
5. Cost savings and ROI
Employee benefits are in many ways an investment. The dividends, however, are not always immediately apparent. But as a general rule of thumb, if your employees are healthier, they will use fewer healthcare resources. One way to measure how well they’re performing is to evaluate relevant cost savings, so you can better understand your ROI.
For wellness programs that target specific employee health outcomes, like mental health or physical health, you can look at year over year healthcare claims numbers to see if the benefit had an impact. You can also look to your employee retention numbers following a benefit’s rollout to get a sense of how it may have helped. As for a baseline, a recent SHRM report found that every dollar invested in health and wellness resulted in nearly six dollars returned in cost savings and productivity.