At the Mad World Summit 2025, 95% of delegates believed wellbeing impact should be measured. If “wellbeing impact” means different things to HR, ESG, Finance and Operations, the harder question remains: measuring what, exactly?
Where to start?
Start with the employee. Employees and their health is an organisation’s most valuable asset; work shapes health and health shapes work. But which outcomes matter most for both the employee and the organisation?
- Employee health outcomes might include existing health challenges, mental wellbeing, sleep sufficiency, musculoskeletal pain, memory, concentration and more.
- Business outcomes could track error rates, safety incidents, absence, presenteeism, retention and performance variation.
To move forward, does there need to be standardised metrics, timeframes and units of analysis applied consistently?
If definitions stabilise across both health and business outcomes, does trust follow?
Would alignment look the same everywhere?
Should construction, finance, manufacturing, education and retail all report identical metrics? Maybe.
Can they report within the same core framework so results are comparable? Probably.
What if wellbeing were anchored to the biopsychosocial model for every employee, then layered on sector and business specific indicators – safety risk, remote working, shift work? Human constants stay fixed; sector and business nuances adapt on top.
What would make wellbeing data trustworthy?
Boards trust financials because they’re comparable, repeatable and auditable.
Could wellbeing data reach that standard if the industry were aligned on one framework, where interpretation varies by business function but the measures stay fixed?
What would that require?
- Consistent, standardised measures across the organisation
- Clear evidence linking wellbeing to business performance
- Independent verification or external benchmarking
- Privacy and governance safeguards strong enough to earn participation
- Stakeholder motivation to act on insights
Does trust require all of these, held together by shared definitions? That’s one hypothesis worth testing.
Do robust measurement tools already exist?
Yes. While health and wellbeing are complex, the industry is not starting from scratch. Robust, validated instruments already exist and are widely used at national and research levels, but not regularly or consistently at organisational level or connected to business specific operational data.
The challenge isn’t inventing new measures. It’s aligning on what to measure, which measurement tools to use and committing to measure the same things in the same way within and across individual organisations. Perhaps the task is simply to align and begin.
What if a workable standard included:
- One core model using a biopsychosocial lens, tied to work design and mapped to board-level outcomes
- Validated instruments plus operational data to move from sentiment to causality
- Comparability by default, aligned to internal and external benchmarks
- Governance—privacy and compliance controls
- Action loops so results trigger decisions, not just reports
These aren’t answers. They’re starting points to pressure-test together.
What happens next
As a selected member of Yorkshire and the Humber’s Springboard for Female Health Innovators – sponsored by Nexus and AWS – we are convening a virtual roundtable with regional and national leaders on ‘The Future of Employee Wellbeing: Measurement and Impact’ to help define what credible wellbeing measurement requires.
We’ll focus on definitions, current gaps, the investment case and what it takes for wellbeing data to be board-grade.
This session is designed for senior decision-makers accountable for workforce health and performance – typically CPOs or HR Directors, Wellbeing and Occupational Health Leads, ESG or Sustainability Heads, limited to 15 participants and focused on evidence, governance and real-world adoption.
If you are interested in joining this roundtable, please email niamh.sullivan@parachutebh.com.
About the author:
Niamh Sullivan is CEO and Co-founder of Parachute – a health analytics company helping leaders quantify the real cost of poor workforce health, decode what’s driving it and evaluate whether current benefits are delivering ROI. Parachute doesn’t sell programmes – just provides the data you need to make sharper decisions.
