Improve wellbeing, improve business

Well people make for healthy businesses

Everyone knows how important wellbeing and mental resilience are in modern business. But is there anything you can actually do about these things, besides putting up some posters, hosting a few group sessions, and hoping for the best?

There’s nothing more frustrating than spending money on well-intentioned initiatives with no way of knowing if they’re doing any good. Well, in this case, it turns out there is something you can do that will get measurable results. I’ve written this guide for you to explain what is available now, how to deploy it effectively in your organisation, and crucially, how to measure its impact on your team.

My own team and I have been in the business of upskilling people – and measuring the impact – for well over 20 years. And that includes improving wellbeing, which is never more important than now. In this guide, I’m going to set out some very concrete and practical steps you can take to ensure your people are as aware, skilled and productive as they can be – and I’ll include details of the online courses available for you to use to address a range of challenges and opportunities.

Having used our online courses, Darren MacDonald, Retail Operations Director at The Works, summed up their experience: “Wellbeing online learning, it was absolutely the right thing to do.” His colleagues agreed: 96% believed their team’s overall performance would improve as a result. (Later I’ll explain how you can capture that kind of data about how your own team has benefitted from upskilling.

Smart employers know healthy employees are productive employees. It’s not just that stressed and anxious employees are more likely to take time off. It’s also that organisations where wellbeing is taken seriously bring out the best in people – and that’s as true when people are working from home as when they are on site. Generation Z and millennials especially need to feel valued and invested in. Effective learning for mental resilience is an effective way to help them flourish, improving motivation and retention as a result. Darren’s colleague at The Works, Operational Trainer Viki Tooth, puts it simply: “It costs a lot of money to find and recruit people; it doesn’t cost much to keep them.”

Taking Wellbeing Seriously

Forward-thinking employers see wellbeing as more than just another box to tick. They see it as a driver of value for the business. That means they treat it with the same seriousness they would apply to sales strategy, investment in technology or indeed recruitment itself. There’s little point bringing in the best talent on the market, if you then fail to make the most of it by helping people to flourish as rounded human beings who bring their whole selves to work.

Of course, achieving that involves investment, but less than you might think, and with a tangible return. Digital and online resources are a time and cost-efficient part of the mix for all modern organisations. For some, they are all it takes to make a real difference to their working culture, often as a supplement rather than a wholesale replacement for their existing learning and development programmes. So, what does a smart and savvy, 21st century approach to wellbeing at work actually look like?

Our forward-thinking clients told us they worried what they were previously using wasn’t cost effective and flexible enough. They wanted short courses for their entire team and something beyond the basics for their managers. So, we partnered with Mind and invested in developing an initial short series of six courses. Each course is around 10 minutes long, and the whole series together is a rapid and low risk way to upskill the entire team and demonstrate return on time and product investment. We’ve had some heart-warming individual feedback on the impact, and also seen tangible business improvements in hard figures, which I’ll cover later.

Online learning to nurture a well culture

Just as the safety of your people and customers should be part of the everyday culture of any well-run business, good physical and mental health needs to be front and centre to nurture a truly rounded and well team. Our courses ensure everyone is knowledgeable about all the key issues, and confident about supporting one another in tackling them when necessary. If they pass the courses, your people will be more resilient in facing challenges and better able to perform.

The courses include video, concise and easy to understand downloadable summaries and some video breathing exercises to learn and use repeatedly. A real-life scenario-based quiz verifies that the learner has done more than retain a few nuggets of information, but will be able to apply what they have learned in real-life situations. Crucially, all learning is tracked for analysis and measurement

When those common mental health issues do come up in the workplace, it’s important that colleagues are able to spot and understand them and then respond in the most effective and appropriate way. So, the series continues with three specific courses on depression, anxiety and stress.

Each course equips learners with the skills to recognise the issues relating to each topic, and what to do about them. Your people will be that much more confident in supporting their colleagues (and family and friends) and the result will be ever-increasing levels of good mental health, which means a better team and a better business.

All these courses are designed to provide the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ in order to drive lasting behaviour change. And because outcomes can be measured, learners and their managers alike can see progress, which provides further motivation for both. Where assessments indicate the learner has not grasped something, they can easily repeat the course (whenever they like, on any device) until they’ve got it.

Learning teams can then report back with confidence that these interventions are making a real difference to people within the business. Further feedback is captured via post-course surveys that go beyond traditional ‘happy sheets’ to gauge learners’ responses on a range of measures, all anonymously. We’ll cover measuring learning to demonstrate progress towards your goals after we’ve considered your managers.

Upskill People’s learning platform also includes an ‘Easy Course Builder’ tool, which allows you to make your wellbeing series (and any other courses) just right for your organisation.

Better Managers = Better Business

The single most important factor in creating, and maintaining a robust wellbeing culture is your managers.

Wellbeing is no different. It’s observations, interactions and day-to-day decisions made by managers that make the biggest difference: the decision to speak to a colleague who seems stressed and tetchy, and to do it sensitively; the decision to overlook a surly attitude and get to the bottom of the issue; the decision not to overlook a mistake, but to deal with it in context. These are not easy decisions, and even managers who know the right thing to do in theory will not always do it in practice.

Upskill People’s Managing People is a complete approach to creating great people managers, and measuring the impact. At its core are seven interactive online courses that harness the power of dramatic scenarios to prepare new managers for their role and update the skills of even the most experienced. The soap opera-like character of the scenarios means they are easy to remember and discuss with colleagues, providing a shared point of reference for ongoing learning and coaching.

Upskill People’s Managing People is a complete approach to creating great people managers, and measuring the impact. At its core are seven interactive online courses that harness the power of dramatic scenarios to prepare new managers for their role and update the skills of even the most experienced. The soap opera-like character of the scenarios means they are easy to remember and discuss with colleagues, providing a shared point of reference for ongoing learning and coaching.

Measurement Essentials

  10 Minute Course Completion Time

Your first decision on looking to deliver some new skills, is what kind of time investment do you want to make? Time really is money. When you decide to upskill your team, you need to consider how much of their time the organisation wants to invest. Regardless of whether you are buying or building content, you need to agree with the business leaders what time is acceptable. Even with a 10-minute course like our wellbeing ones, for a team of 1,000 people, this would represent 167 hours of learning. If they took 15 minutes, that would involve an extra 83 hours the business didn’t expect or plan for. We know from delivering millions of our courses how long they will take, but everyone is different, and if you’re deploying anything for the first time this is something to monitor carefully, especially in the initial weeks.

As well as an absolute goal, again, set tolerances. We would suggest 20% either side of your goal is a good range to aim for. What if you land outside your goal range? If everyone breezes through first time, perhaps they genuinely do already have the knowledge and skills, or they may have been rushing to get it done. No matter how much interactivity there is (and there should be a lot to engage the learner), the temptation is there for some. This is where the measure of quiz attempts comes in: how many times did it take them to pass the quiz. If people are passing only after multiple attempts, for example more than 2.5 on average, that indicates they’ve not digested and learned what they need from the course, but are simply repeating the quiz until they get a pass. This ‘ticks the box’ for course completion, but have they really learned anything, and will they change behaviour and show an improvement when you measure the impact later? Unlikely. So we always look for a range of between 1.5 and 2.4 as an average.

Another use of these measurements is to see if some teams, or indeed individuals, are taking significantly longer to complete a course (or requiring more attempts). If a large proportion of your audience is taking a lot longer than you expect, especially when combined with a high number of quiz attempts, it may indicate that one or more questions aren’t worded well (especially if some of your teams don’t have the language the course is written in as their first language), so a simple reword could be an easy improvement. The same results could also indicate that the information presented in the course doesn’t adequately cover the topic for them to answer some of the questions. If you spot it soon enough, and you have a really easy to update course building tool, this can be fixed immediately by analysing the data and seeing which questions they are getting wrong the most often (another measure we have within our courses and platform).

If the variations from your goals are isolated to countries, areas, teams, roles or individuals, then you can provide support and encouragement as required. Knowing what to measure and setting goals is exceptionally powerful, and will deliver significantly better outcomes. But there’s more to it than setting goals, waiting a few weeks or months and then reporting back. Measurement should be continuous, so you can compare results against your goals (final or interim). That way, if you’re off track, you can take action to get back on track. Ultimately, you get out what you put in. If you simply make a course available and leave it at that, you are unlikely to get the same results you would get if you launched the same course with an internal marketing campaign, encouraging your people to engage, learn and spread the word. Once you’ve recognised that an investment in upskilling goes beyond just deploying the courses, you can manage your risk, and are much more likely to shine and achieve success.

 Stats are one thing, but what do the learners think?

And how do they feel? The next level of measurement is more qualitative, but it can also be quantified in hard numbers, which means you can set goals and hit them. Well-considered post-course surveys can tell you how your people feel about their learning, so decide what numbers you expect to be responding positively. When it comes to wellbeing, of course, this is particularly valuable and important. Here is an example set of data from a survey we conducted with The Works. After over 1 million minutes of online learning across the organisation, 97% said the courses were easy to use.

 Link it to business strategy and their goals

Looking at learning measures and feedback alone is incredibly valuable. Nevertheless, there is one more thing to look at for the complete picture, especially where something tangible is measured, and that is the impact the learning has on the wider business. Some things are easy to measure, such as: sales, costs and service levels, as they’re measured by techniques like Net Promoter.

There are also more challenging measures. For example, we analyse the performance of our management courses, including Wellbeing, by mapping all the assessments to 7 competencies with 69 underlying behaviours. For wellbeing, there are a range of specific business measures you can look at. For example:

• Time taken off sick
• Feedback from employee engagement surveys
• Productivity gains
• Exit-interviews when people move on from the business
• Fewer disciplinary or legal issues (and associated costs)

So, this final level of measurement is the impact of learning on the wider organisation, which is a win for everyone involved. In the words of Zishan Amir, General Manager of Mega Adventure:

Setting clear goals means an improved wellbeing culture can be quantified, providing a clear indication of the value of this learning, and making a solid business case to convince the most sceptical of Boards. Some of this is very simple. Some is a little more complicated, but as you’ve seen, the results are more than worth it. So, whatever you’re doing in terms of learning, always set goals and test your learning against them. My team and I have shown time and again that good learning can be measured, and learning for wellbeing is no different.

Take a little time for yourself

If you feel like you need a little time out, then be good to yourself and check out a short breathing exercise, to give you that extra little bit of calm in your busy day.