Employers’ well-being efforts have faced increased scrutiny this year. For example:
The two reports have a common theme: Well-being programs need to become a part of the business, not just a patchwork collection of interventions aimed at employees. Fleming’s study voiced a concern that UK well-being efforts may too often focus on changing employees, not the organization; The Conference Board report recommended embedding employee well-being into an organization’s business strategy and culture in order to truly make a difference.
An April report from The Conference Board recommended integrating employee well-being into an organization’s business strategy and culture by taking steps such as:
One organization that’s tackling some of these concerns is global professional services firm EY. It has taken steps to capture wellness data in a more integrated fashion, help leaders take fast action based on the data and integrate well-being efforts into business operations.
To assess the well-being of its employees, EY developed a Vitality Index based on 10 drivers and then linked those drivers to well-being and business interests.
“We can draw a direct linkage (from these drivers) to people’s well-being or vitality, but also each of the 10 drivers directly correlate to employee retention,” said Frank Giampietro, Americas chief well-being officer at EY. For example, employees who take time off regularly — as opposed to taking one extended vacation a year — are 1.6 times more likely to stay with the organization, Giampietro said.
The 10 drivers in EY’s Vitality Index are:
Data on these drivers come from two different sources: employee surveys and operational systems.
Half of the drivers are measured through questions added to employee pulse surveys, which are sent three times a year to EY’s approximately 55,000 U.S. employees. The other half are derived from existing operational data in EY’s systems, such as which employees participate in the firm’s corporate social responsibility program or regularly take time off.
“We’re trying to combine what people are telling us through the survey data with data that we’re already sitting on,” Giampietro explained. “We wanted to see what metrics we could collect and spotlight for our leaders that would give them data that they otherwise might not have or would be really hard to find around well-being.”
All EY principals, partners and managing directors — about 3,000 people — have access to a dashboard that provides data on the 10 well-being drivers, as well as trend lines for each team and how each group’s results compare to internal benchmarks and targets.
Before rolling out this tool, EY launched a yearlong proof of concept that generated two key pieces of feedback from leaders — and two corresponding responses from the organization.
Feedback item #1: Data overload. The first piece of feedback was that leaders valued the data but were overwhelmed by the quantity of information. In response, the organization reduced the number of drivers from 24 to 10.
In addition, to keep leaders from getting overwhelmed by the dashboard data, EY cautions them against trying to do too much at one time, Giampietro said. “Try to pick one or two drivers that you want to focus on,” he tells them. “Spend six months really focusing on trying to improve those things and then see how you’re doing and see if you want to switch (to a different focus area).”
Some leaders consult with their teams to determine which drivers to target, something Giampietro agrees with wholeheartedly. “I think giving people a voice in what they’re going to focus on together is hugely important,” he said.
Feedback item #2: Unclear action steps. The second opinion was that leaders weren’t always sure what to do with the data. So, EY now gives leaders specific recommendations designed to help them improve their teams’ well-being scores.
For example, above each driver on the dashboard leaders see a lightbulb icon; when they click the icon, they see two to four interventions they can take to boost employee well-being in that particular area.
“One of the drivers is feeling recognized,” Giampietro explained, “and if you click on that lightbulb, it will say, ‘When was the last time you gave a recognition award to someone on your team?’ and then it will take you (via a hyperlink) to our recognition site. So, right within the tool, you can go from an insight to an action that quickly.”
Giampietro said the Vitality Index is leading to lots of positive interventions on an individual team or function level.
He noted that one team had a score on the index in the “time for healthy habits” category that was lower than internal benchmarks and trending downward. The initial assumption was that those team members were working a lot of hours and not getting the time off they needed. But by looking at the broader data set, EY discovered the team members were actually working fewer hours and taking time off at a higher rate than other employees.
A closer look at the data revealed these employees were working across three, four and sometimes five different teams. As a result, they were experiencing a never-ending crush of deadlines and didn’t feel they had control over their time.
To address the issue, EY created “pods” so that even when employees work across multiple teams, the group is kept intact and employees are better able to manage their deadlines together.
Another team implemented regular shared focus time during peak periods, improved connections through one-on-one meetings between the team leader and team members and established frequent positive recognition after key milestones to acknowledge accomplishments. As a result of these changes, an EY spokesperson shared, there has been a 10% increase in the team’s well-being scores and a 21% increase in its members feeling valued and appreciated.
It’s starting to become a part of how we operate the business, and that was the ultimate goal: to make well-being a thread through the business conversation.
On an aggregate level, one of the biggest impacts Giampietro has seen is that well-being has increasingly become part of the business conversation. In fact, the senior leadership team reviews the Vitality Index data quarterly, the same way it reviews financial data.
“They’ll look at how we’re doing from a sales perspective, how we’re doing from a revenue perspective and how we’re doing from a Vitality Index perspective,” he said. “It’s starting to become a part of how we operate the business, and that, to me, was the ultimate goal: to make this a thread through the business conversation.”
Employees appreciate the fact that senior leaders are focusing on well-being, said Giampietro. “They’re also excited to hear that it’s a part of the conversation at the senior leadership level,” he added.
Employees have even indicated that they’d like to see more of the data. “They want more and more visibility into how their team’s doing and what they could be better at, so I see that as a really good sign — that eagerness to see the data and really understand what’s going well,” said Giampietro. “It’s created that sort of shared sense of working at opportunities to improve together.”
The organization has been using the Vitality Index in the U.S. for less than a year, but the results have been promising enough that EY is looking to roll out the effort to more of its 300,000 global employees. “We’re looking to expand into Canada and Latin America right now,” said Giampietro, “and then looking for opportunities to expand outside the Americas over the next couple of years as well.”