Organisations need to have an overarching view on the mental health of their employees, and how this is impacting organisational culture and performance. There was acknowledgement here that this involves ‘owning’ the mental health problem and root causes, and ensuring leadership has visibility on whether or not their current initiatives are working or not.
However, respondents were split on where the responsibility for wellbeing measurement lies, with many discussing an increasingly shared responsibility between wellbeing provider and client. It was mentioned that this would be particularly useful if they could provide evidence of impact broken down by age, gender, roles, hierarchy or geography. This would help providers to support their clients in making wellbeing more of an organisation-wide concern.
However, service providers talked about the need to engage in expectation setting and contracting, enabling a shared responsibility on the quality and utility of the data collected. As such, organisations need to take ownership and internally engage with the data collection process, as often external providers have their hands tied in how they can collect data without support from the organisation. A need to be transparent with what you are doing with the outcomes was also stressed, as mentioned in the previous section.
There was a feeling from some respondents that external verification from third party organisations has more clout than analysis that has been carried out internally. To ensure organisations put the required focus and resources towards the process, it was recommended by some that companies make a financial commitment to pay for their wellbeing analytics, because If analytics are provided for free or funded by a different spot in the chain, an ensuing lack of commitment will not necessarily deliver the required outcomes.