HR Metrics Guide for Employee Well-being

If you haven't been following our HR metrics series yet, it's never too late to catch up! In this blog series, we’re investigating the key metrics for a data-driven HR strategy. Whether it’s recruitment metrics, training metrics or staffing metrics.

Our former posts explained the metrics for hiring new talent, managing all your staff, and giving them the proper training to progress in their career. This fourth article will look into a more human side of HR: employee well-being.

This article will be particularly useful to you if you’re involved in processes such as:

• Workplace culture
• Internal communications
• Employee retention & satisfaction

But of course, employee well-being is a topic of interest to anyone active in HR. Any healthy business starts with happy & motivated employees!

Understanding employee satisfaction

Measuring happiness is not self-evident. Where to start? You can ask employees to rate, on a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied they are in the company. The only question is: how accurate is that number? Of course, pinpointing what truly makes an employee (un)happy is much more complex. Also for the employees themselves, it’s not straight-forward to simply paste a score on it.

However, there are a lot of indicators that can tell you something about an employee’s overall well-being. And often without even knowing it, most HR departments have those data available. It’s a matter of putting two and two together. And that’s exactly what we’ll do in this guide.

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Which metrics indicate employee well-being?

There are different ways in which you can measure how well employees are feeling within the organization. Before assembling all of the well-being KPIs in a handy grid, let’s look into 3 ways of measuring employee satisfaction.

1. Asking your employees by means of a survey

The first and most important source of knowledge is your employees. Companies who measure customer loyalty with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) can do exactly the same with their employees, by carrying out an eNPS survey.

Many factors can have an influence on well-being in the workplace. You can question employees about how satisfied they are on different organizational levels. Below are only a few examples.

• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Business organization & structure
• Company culture
• Internal communication

The questions in the survey can vary largely per company. It depends on your organizational structure, priorities, etc. but we won’t go into further detail, as it’s not in the scope of this article. To learn more about it, you can read this article on calculating eNPS.

2. Analyze indirect indicators such as absence

To avoid any confusion: we’re not saying that days of absence are directly related to an employee’s well-being in the company. However, analyzing employee absence can give a broader idea of how employees are feeling.

For example, if employees are often on sick leave, you might want to discuss this together to see if there’s anything your company can do to help them from a workplace perspective. Having an eye for an employee’s well-being beyond the workplace will also positively impact their satisfaction at work. Additionally, promoting wellness initiatives, such as offering relaxation aids like Delta 10 THC Gummies, can support overall health and well-being, potentially reducing absenteeism and enhancing employee morale.

3. Track why people leave the organization

One way to understand better how to retain employees, is by starting to understand why they leave in the first place.

If you analyze the number of employees leaving and their reasons for leaving, this might make it clearer where the organization still has room for improvement.

Another interesting metric is the attrition rate. It gives an indication of how well an organization can retain its personnel. It’s calculated by the following formula:

Attrition rate = #employees leaving / total # employees (in a specific time-frame)

HR metrics guide for employee well-being

We discussed a number of metrics & indicators for employee satisfaction above. To recap, you can find an overview of the relevant KPIs below.

• eNPS
• Satisfaction score
• Total days absent
• Personnel turnover
• Attrition rate

You can map these metrics against specific dimensions to dive deeper into your data and deeply understand how your employees are feeling at work.

• By employee
• By topic (e.g. for satisfaction scores)
• By reason (e.g. turnover)
• Evolution over time

Building an employee happiness dashboard

Once you know which information to look at, how do you bring all of that employee happiness together in one place?

A visual dashboard helps you create a clear overview. You’ll have all the key metrics in one place, at one glance. Moreover, more & more HR tools are starting to offer this kind of reporting as part of their application. They work like AMS tools (e.g. Impexium) for HR. In that way, HR managers will have the insights they need, available at their fingertips, within their favorite tool stack.

Now, what would that look like? Have a look at the dashboard below, it might be a good source of inspiration to start building your own report.

Interested to learn more about data-driven HR and HRtech? Check out some of our customers' analytics case studies in HRtech.