How can a Wellbeing Audit help your organisation develop the most effective wellbeing strategy for your business?

One of our first recommendations for any organisation developing a wellbeing strategy is to undertake a wellbeing audit.

Assessing the business, both in terms of the current wellbeing landscape within the organisation, and in terms of the current Mental Fitness status of employees, ensures that the developing strategy is tailored around the business and what it needs, and is personalised to individual needs.

Firstly identify the obstacles and opportunities faced by the business. What objectives could be more readily achieved by teams with optimal Mental Fitness? How might Mental Fitness challenges be impacting the organisation? Is the organisation experiencing staff retention issues, or experiencing increases and declines in productivity? Do you have objectives around innovation or performance improvement?

Secondly, dive deeper into the Mental Fitness of individuals across the business. Profiling individual strengths and challenges enables an understanding of the patterns and trends occurring across teams and across the organisation.

These are critical steps in ensuring that any wellbeing strategy is aligned with, and part of the wider business strategy. Wellbeing and Mental Fitness should never be a “nice to have” add on to the business. It should be at the heart of driving business transformation and business performance.

What Mental Fitness measures can help to understand the landscape in an organisation?

Cognomie’s profiling tool audits individuals against 24 key measures to allow an understanding of their individual status, the effect of the environment around them, and the foundational elements of Mental Fitness.

These “markers” can be invaluable in gaining an understanding of where the business is as a collective and identifying areas that any Mental Fitness strategy should focus on.

Ideally we then work with you to analyse the data from your Cognosis, but you can review the aggregated data from your audit and ask yourself a few key questions.

Are there patterns?

Can you see a clear picture of where Mental Fitness is stronger or weaker across the business?

Often if there are lots of people with similar scores in critical areas of Mental Fitness then there are clear issues to address.

We frequently see patterns where if markers such as stress and anxiety are high and optimism and confidence are low, these correlate with issues around lower levels of retention and productivity.

Identifying consistently lower levels of proactivity, motivation and engagement across the business can be a clue that people lack a shared set of values and a sense of belonging with the business and ensure that the evolving strategy focuses on strengthening culture and values.

Conversely higher scoring levels around happiness, sleep, physical health and confidence can point positively to a thriving organisational culture and innovation.

Are there variances?

Often the variances in the data provide as much or more insight as the patterns themselves.

If senior managers and leadership teams present positive scores for Mental Fitness and other levels of the organisation negative scores then this can point to an urgent need to empower and support lower level teams or put in place organisation wide support and coaching to create a greater equilibrium in how positivity, motivation and engagement, for example, are distributed.

Similarly disparities in the data can point to the need to focus Mental Fitness and wellbeing support on newer members of the organisation, or to find ways to support work / life balance for employees with families where more flexible models of working might rapidly improve these scores.

Which elements of the data can be used for benchmarking?

The key is to spend some time with the data available to select key elements that are most likely to have an impact on wider business challenges and opportunities and on strengthening individual and organisational wellbeing and to use these as benchmark KPIs.

Designing the strategy to demonstrate improvements over time in these key metrics helps to ensure wider stakeholder buy-in and that the required resources are committed to the strategy.

We work with you and your team to diagnose the data and develop programmes that ensure impact and are measurable within your organisation. Helping shape an organisational wellbeing approach that is founded in insight.