Everything You Need To Know About Our Employee Wellbeing Survey

What Is A Wellbeing Survey?

A wellbeing survey is designed to help you uncover how your people feel about their emotional, physical, and even financial wellbeing. A well-designed wellbeing survey will help an employer understand not only how their team ranks their own wellbeing, but also how you can support and encourage them to improve this. 

Research has shown that wellbeing programmes are often underutilised. 57% of employees felt that their organisations supported their health and wellbeing, while 58% of businesses reported that their health benefits were underutilised by staff, as reported in Employee Benefits. This shows that there is a major disconnect between organisations and their staff. Employee wellbeing surveys can help bridge this gap and ensure clear communications. 

What Makes Our Wellbeing Survey Different?

Most employee wellbeing surveys fall short because they only focus on measuring individual wellbeing levels and the impact of specific initiatives.

Our wellbeing survey is designed around three basic pillars: mental health, physical health and support from the organisation and managers. Our approach will give you a complete overview of wellbeing and mental health within your organisation.

What Questions Are Included In Our Wellbeing Survey?

Our 9-question survey is built around five key drivers of happiness and engagement: safety, relationships, freedom, clarity and enablement. Responses are given on a ranked scale from 1-10 to give a quantitative understanding about how your team think and feel about their own mental health and wellbeing and also how your organisation supports these. 

There is also space for long-form text answers, these provide context for the quantitative scores and also give space for suggestions and feedback. This qualitative feedback is processed within our reporting to support you in making the best decisions for your people and your organisation. 

What Are The Benefits Of Our Wellbeing Survey?

There are so many studies and stats that have proved time and time again why investing in wellbeing is so important. Here are a few powerful ones: 

• 84% of UK employees feel their mental health is not well supported at work - Lime Insurance

• 21% of employees reported calling in sick due to workplace stress - Mind

• Evidence suggests that 12.7% of all sickness absence days in the UK can be attributed to mental health conditions. - The Mental Health Foundation

• Every $1 invested in the treatment and support of common mental health issues translates to a return of $4 in improved health and productivity - WHO

• Half of respondents believe health and wellbeing benefits help to shorten working hours (48%), reduce absenteeism (47%) and improve employee productivity (47%) - Cigna Healthcare

As the research shows, spending time and money on employee wellbeing can support both your people and your organisation, but only if done well. Our wellbeing survey will help you to ensure you’re focusing your approach on the places that matter. 

What Are The Limitations Of Our Wellbeing Survey?

It’s important to remember that there isn’t any silver bullet solution to your team’s mental health and wellbeing. Understanding what they want and need to support their own mental health and wellbeing will help ensure you’re spending your resources in the best possible way. However, it’s impossible to please everyone all the time, and there will always be situations and individuals who will fall outside of your normal provisions or who you might not be able to help at all. Keeping an open mind and flexible approach to wellbeing is vital. 

People’s needs and expectations can and will change. This is why doing a one-off survey will never be enough in the long term. You will be able to capture a snapshot in time, but not the ongoing response to your programme. Here we would suggest including always-on listening to gauge reaction to roll out, but also to consider repeating the survey. Your customer success manager will be able to support you in making data-led decisions that will work best for your team and your organisational needs. 

Lastly, it’s easy to forget that not every individual feels comfortable opening up about their mental health and wellbeing needs. The anonymisation of our survey usually helps to mitigate this as people feel more comfortable with the added protection of a third-party platform. But it’s still important to build trust in your feedback programme. This is particularly true of organisations that work in an international context, where other cultures may feel even less able to open up around these issues. 

Why Should You Use Our Wellbeing Survey?

Our wellbeing survey allows you to dive deeper than your standard wellbeing survey. Here are our top 5 benefits from using our survey for your organisation: 

1. It’s The Right Thing To Do - supporting your people to be as happy and healthy as they can be is unquestionably the right thing to do. Doing this in a way that actually supports their unique needs and wishes is even better. We’re confident that our survey and implementing actions based on the insights will make your people’s lives better. 

2. Anonymity Is Guaranteed - our platform is supported by a robust anonymity protocol we call “our golden rule”. This means that your people will feel more able to share their candid feedback and you will get more accurate data. An aspect that is particularly important when thinking about a sensitive topic like wellbeing. 

3. Put Your People At The Heart Of Their Wellbeing - research shows that in the case of wellbeing initiatives you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make them drink. It’s really important to put the individuals on your team in charge of their own wellbeing. By soliciting feedback and acting on their responses you will help facilitate this. 

4. Data-Backed Decision Making - it’s easy to pour money and resources into employee wellbeing programmes based on gut feeling. However, to see the most return on your investment, it’s better to use data to make decisions. This will ensure you’re focusing your attention on areas that are likely to get you the best bang for your buck. 

5. Support Your Managers - because wellbeing is so individualised, you will be reliant on individual managers to ensure the success of your programme. Our platform can help support this. With different layers of access for different stakeholders, you will be able to enable your managers to take the reins within their teams to support the individuals they work with. 

What Actionable Insights Might You Gain From Our Wellbeing Survey? 

Our wellbeing survey is designed to support you in creating a wellbeing programme that supports the engagement and happiness of your whole team. This means that some of the insights you might get are: 

1. Quick Wins & Communication Focuses - many of our customers find that they uncover areas where they actually have programming in place, but it isn’t effectively signposted. By understanding what your team thinks is missing, you can find areas where you can make huge improvements simply by communicating more clearly or more frequently.

2. Successes Within Your Existing Programme - it might seem counterintuitive that successes are actionable, but signposting what is going well actually builds confidence in your programme from within your team and can inspire more people to take advantage of your offering. 

3. Understanding Of Current Work-Life Balance - work-life balance is a major driver of wellbeing that as an employer you have a good amount of control over. By measuring how your team feel about their work-life balance, you’ll be able to understand resourcing and stress levels within your organisation and start work to manage these. 

4. What Your People Want & Need - your team are likely to uncover areas where they believe you can do more to support, and many of our customers find that their feedback includes concrete suggestions. Although these might not all be feasible, often they spark an idea that is practical. 

5. Areas To Explore Further - your feedback may uncover particular areas or questions for further exploration. This further work might take the form of further surveys, or they might require an employee action group or other working party. Your customer success manager can provide you with individualised advice. 

What Impacts Have Our Customers Seen From Using Our Wellbeing Survey?

Here are some of the insights customers have gained using our wellbeing survey and programme ideas they have implemented: 

• Many customers use our surveys to benefit the wellbeing of their employees & taking a proactive approach to ensuring people and their families' needs are met. 

• One customer introduced a ‘buddy up’  programme so they can have someone else to speak to outside of their own team / business area for support.

• Another introduced a monthly reflect and grow day which they can use however they see fit to aid their wellbeing and personal growth.

How Can You Make Sure You’re Successful With Our Wellbeing Survey?

Just running a wellbeing survey isn’t enough to guarantee return on investment. Here are some steps you should consider taking to get the results you and your organisation need. 

1. Leading From The Front - any wellbeing programme requires buy-in from your entire organisation. Particularly when it comes to work-life balance, it’s really important that leadership take a proactive role in modelling behaviours that promote wellbeing and creating a culture where wellbeing is prioritised. 

2. A Consistent Communication Strategy - communication is so important when it comes to sensitive issues such as wellbeing and mental health. This is why it’s really important to communicate with your team, thank them for providing feedback, and letting them know what action you’re going to take off the back of the data. 

3. Ongoing Support & Feedback - opening up to feedback about mental health and wellbeing can lead to increased openness from your team. This can be positive because it will help you better support your people, but you will need to allocate time and resources to supporting this in order that your program doesn’t stall or lose momentum. 

4. Encouraging A Flexible Mindset & Approach - a solution you implement, no matter how well intentioned, might not have the desired effect. This is why you need to continue to monitor sentiment and collect feedback on any changes, so that you can be reactive and change tack if something doesn’t work for your people or no longer meets their needs. 

5. Don’t Run One Survey In Isolation - it’s much easier to lose trust than to build it. Soliciting feedback and then abandoning your program is the quickest way to destroy the trust you worked hard to create. Building an ongoing strategy is really important to get the most out of your investment. 

For more information about building a culture of wellbeing that works for your unique team, why not check out our eBook: Creating An Employee Engagement AND Happiness Strategy.

What Other Surveys Should You Run With Our Wellbeing Survey?

Our wellbeing survey is designed to get you the results that your organisation needs. But to maximise impact, we recommend using it alongside some of our other employee surveys. The most popular to use to improve your organisation’s wellbeing programme include:

• Mental Health - Deep-dive into your people's mental health so you can support everyone's wellbeing.

• Employee Voice - Stay reactive to the changes to what your team needs and wants with our always-on listening offering.

• Recognition Impact - Your benefits and recognition package can play an important part in your team’s wellbeing, gain a deeper understanding of how your team thinks and feels about this important factor with our recognition survey. 

If you want to learn more about how our wellbeing survey could supercharge your organisation’s culture, why not chat to one of our experts? Book in a call today.