How to monitor employee vitality

More and more organisations become data-driven in order to monitor and optimize critical business aspects. We want to make informed decisions based on facts rather than solely on gut feeling. Within the Human Resources discipline we often refer to the term HR analytics when we talk about working data-driven. A huge misunderstanding is that quite a lot HR professionals think that HR analytics is all about quantitative data where people become numbers. This is not the case! An important topic within the HR analytics field is employee vitality. The wellbeing, both physically and mentally, of your employees. The question is: how to monitor soft metrics like employee vitality?

Why we should focus employee vitality

In order to understand why we should focus on employee vitality, let’s start with the question: what is employee vitality? Employee vitality and employee well-being are terms that are frequently used to describe the physical and mental state of employees. Employee vitality is associated with people who are enthusiastic, motivated and lively. Of course, every person is unique. We do not all display the same amount of enthusiasm and motivation, but we can tell if someone is feeling more or less well.

HR scholars have argued that in high performance-oriented organizations, the heightened demand for higher labour productivity through discretionary effort, comes at the expense of employee well-being (Dorenbosch, 2009). In short, in our drive to become high performing organizations we put employee well-being under pressure. On the other hand, employee well-being, both physically and mentally, will positively impact organisational performance. Happy, motivated and driven employees are more likely to excel in their job and display more adaptiveness to change. In addition, when employee vitality is low people can become stressed and eventually got sick. Resulting in more absenteeism, less engagement, work conflicts, employee turnover and a drop in productivity.

How to monitor vitality

We all know the importance of employee well-being, but what most of us do not know is how to monitor it. Some HR professionals try to monitor employee vitality via quarterly surveys and personal development records. Although this is a great effort to get at least some insights regarding employee vitality, it is far from perfect. In order to understand how employee vitality impacts your organisation, you need a tool which monitors multiple influencers of vitality (e.g. sleep, stress, physical activity) on daily bases.

Lucky you, your IT department does not have to build a vitality platform for you! They probably do not even have the time for it. We already have build the vitality program for you! Fitter, a vitality platform for organisations that teaches, motivates and rewards employees for healthy behaviour. Our platform is ready to use. We could implement it within days, rather than months. And, it is customizable when there are custom needs in the organisation. If you have any questions feel free to contact us by clicking on the “Plan a demo” or “Get started” buttons in the navigation or by filling out the form below:

References

Dorenbosch, L. W. (2009). Management by vitality. Ridderprint