Health data can drive real change within your organisation.

What a time to be involved in the digital and tech industry! Creativity is thriving and business is booming. These sectors continue to be one of the fastest-growing in the UK.

However, as a consequence of rapid growth, there is a large skills gap and an increase in job vacancies. This leads to increased pressure and from that stress, anxiety and/or depression. This is where employee health data can help.

The British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) recently reported that;

You are 5X more likely to be depressed than the national average if you work in Tech.

Pretty shocking Really! Read the full Tech Inclusion and Diversity Report 2019 here.

Stress Kills Creativity and if you are the people person for your organisation, action needs to be taken!

Let’s rewind back to the beginning. What a lot of organisations are doing is just not working and as a result, work-related ill-health statistics are not improving.

You cannot drive strategy for change without key health data and this data should be the foundation of your workplace health and wellbeing solutions!

The 5 Elements of Health Data can drive you forward in what should be an exciting time for creatives:

Employee Engagement

Providing employees with individualised health checks and lifestyle assessments (the tools used to extract the data from them) not only promotes higher morale and self-worth – but engages people in their health.

Yes. Funnily enough, speaking to a Nurse actually encourages people to take responsibility for their own health.

Approximately 70% of Individuals that have a workplace health check, make positive lifestyle changes that improve their health.

Strategy

Do you have a workplace wellbeing strategy? Is it cut and pasted straight from google with a few tweaks here and there?

Company values should be at the heart of your strategy. What can you realistically afford to pay for? Can you allocate time to spend on delivering what you say you can?

Data is really valuable when it comes to strategy writing as it results in you aiming to improve the key problem areas affecting your employees. Communication is key here.

Initiatives

We know most organisations are providing some sort of health and wellbeing initiatives for their employees and this is great, but are these smokescreen and mirrors and just masking the real underlying problems people are facing?

Yoga and cycle to work are all well and good for Skinny Susan but is Fat Bob in accounts going to wear Lycra and do yoga at lunch or get on a bike and cycle the 20-mile round trip to work and back each day?

I have news for you, and you probably already know what it is!

The answer is NO. It’s Fat Bob that needs your help. It’s Fat Bob that is stressed. It is Fat Bob that is at risk of a heart attack and stroke!

Let’s make your wellbeing initiatives realistic and engaging for everyone to join in and benefit from.

Measuring and Monitoring

In business, we measure and monitor just about everything except for employee health and wellbeing.

Yes, there are staff surveys and opinion polls. But unless your culture is at the top of its game, how open and honest do you think your employees are when it comes to sharing their thoughts with HR and management?

How do you know if you’ve made any improvements unless you have measured where you started? This goes for workplace wellbeing too.

It’s no good having baseline data if you don’t do anything with it!

Look at the information and see what it is telling you.

What outcomes do you want to achieve? Are you improving health? Has absenteeism decreased and productivity and creativity increased?

Surprisingly, about 30% of organisations do not measure absenteeism, even although they know it has a detrimental impact on their business.

Another shocking fact is that for every £1 you are losing to absenteeism; you are losing £2.50 to presenteeism!

Prevention

We have all heard the saying that prevention is better than cure. Yet as a society we remain very reactive in most everyday situations.

We all know that stress is impactful on our mental health, but how often do we think about the physical damage it is causing?

There are currently 5 million adults walking around the UK with undiagnosed high blood pressure. Stress and poor lifestyle choices play a major role in what is described as a silent killer.

Long-standing high blood pressure leads to heart attack and stroke. What impact would that have on an individual, their community and you as an organisation?

This is before I even talk about increased obesity, the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cancer and work-related mental ill-health!

Identifying problems before they become a crisis can only be positive for everyone involved.

 

There you have it, the 5 elements of health data, the foundation of workplace health. Employee engagement, strategy, initiatives, measuring and monitoring and prevention.

The fundamentals that should drive you forward together; ensuring your creatives are at the top of their game and your developers are coding happy!

Oh, I forgot to mention your return on investment ……… ah let’s not bother!

As a result of focusing on people and outcomes; return on investment will be a natural by-product of a healthy, happy and creative workforce.