Most organisations still define success through a familiar set of metrics: revenue, profit, margin, earnings per share and cash flow. These measures matter, but they share a critical limitation: they tell leaders what has already happened, not what is likely to happen next. A business can be hitting its quarterly numbers and still be hollowing out the very people that it’s future success depends on.
The research is now unambiguous. Companies with higher employee wellbeing scores consistently outperform on profitability, productivity, retention and stock market returns. And yet, for most organisations, wellbeing remains voluntary, rather than a fundamental metric on which they are judged. That gap deserves serious attention.
Why wellbeing is a leading indicator
Traditional financial metrics are mostly lagging indicators. They report what has already been achieved, but they tell us little about the conditions that make future performance possible: how people feel, how well they can do their jobs, and how they work together.
When people have the energy to focus, the skills to contribute, and relationships built on trust and support, an organisation has the capacity to deliver, to learn and to build a stronger future. When people are running on empty, under-supported or don’t feel that they belong, the cracks in future performance are already forming, even if the numbers haven’t caught up yet.
Employee wellbeing is a leading signal of whether people have what they need to contribute at their best, and one that predicts outcomes long before they show up in financial reports. In this sense, wellbeing is not a “nice‑to‑have”; it is a revenue driver, and it is the one business metric with a credible claim to predicting future success.
The reporting gap no one can afford to ignore
Every listed company is required to report on its financial health in a standardised, auditable form. Investors use this information to assess performance, price risk and decide where to put their money. If organisations with stronger employee wellbeing consistently generate better financial returns, it raises an important question: why is workforce wellbeing not subject to the same reporting rigour?
An investor today has decades of comparable financial data at their fingertips. By contrast, they have very limited access to independently verified information about how well a company’s people are actually doing. They cannot easily compare one organisation’s wellbeing performance against another, track it over time, or build it systematically into their investment decisions. If, as the evidence suggests, wellbeing is genuinely a leading indicator of financial performance, then it is material information, and as such it is information that should be made public.
ESG reporting shows us what’s possible. Environmental and governance factors moved from voluntary aspiration to management discipline when external accountability and investor scrutiny made them visible. The same shift has not yet happened for workforce wellbeing, and the result is a market where organisations that genuinely invest in their people are not consistently rewarded in the way they would be if that data were comparable and transparent.
What gets reported gets managed
What organisations choose to measure shapes how they manage. If leaders focus only on revenue, costs and profit, they will naturally gravitate towards short‑term optimisation, even when this gradually erodes the conditions people need to perform well over time. When wellbeing is placed at the centre of the dashboard, leaders are more likely to put their workforce at the centre of their decision‑making. It turns out that what’s good for people tends to be good for the business too.
The core principle is simple: when organisations treat people’s wellbeing as a leading indicator of performance, it starts to influence decisions about strategy, investment and risk in the same way financial metrics currently do. Over time, this will shift wellbeing from being a discretionary initiative to where it needs to be: a shared expectation of good management and responsible governance. A way of running a business that, in the future, could, and arguably should, be standard practice.
A call to boards and investors
Until employee wellbeing is included in the standard reporting frameworks through which companies present themselves to the world, it will remain something progressive organisations do voluntarily while others treat it as optional. Boards should demand standardised, independently assured wellbeing information as part of mainstream corporate reporting, so that they can oversee not just past financial results but the conditions that make future performance possible. Investors should use that information to understand how well a company cares for the people who create its value, and to factor that into decisions about risk and long‑term returns.
When people thrive, organisations tend to thrive too. The evidence supports it. The reporting should reflect it.
Author profile
Glen Ridgway is the founder of the Workplace Wellbeing Academy and author of The Wellbeing Advantage: how caring for your people can power your business. A former Chartered Civil Engineer, he draws on his own living experience of workplace mental ill-health to help organisations build cultures where people genuinely thrive. Through the Workplace Wellbeing Academy, he and his team provide evidence-based wellbeing training, consultancy and audits to organisations across the public and private sectors, supporting leaders to integrate human sustainability into mainstream business performance.
Read the White Paper this paper is based on “Why Employee Wellbeing Is the Most Important Measure of Business Success.”
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