At Cardinus, we believe a healthy workforce is a productive workforce, but identifying the factors that are impeding your employees’ wellbeing and productivity can be a challenge for many organisations.

More recently we’ve seen the rise of the employee engagement surveys, but do they ask the right questions to enable leadership and management to effectively assess productivity? We don’t think so.

In this article we discuss why the right data is essential to understanding wellbeing and productivity – especially in light of hybrid working models, and how our latest innovation, Healthy Working Analytics, can help you assess the factors impacting your workforce.

The impact of hybrid working

As many organisations move to a post-Covid hybrid working model, never has it been more important for management to understand the drivers of productivity within their workforce.

Until now business leaders were able to optimise employee equipment and environments to encourage maximum productivity – think Display Screen Equipment (DSE) training or privacy partitions. But this is no longer the case.

Working from home has different distractors to the office and working from home in a dedicated room is very different from working at a kitchen table with the family around you.

The undeniable distance placed between workers and leaders due to homeworking is a concern for many businesses – and workers may feel connected to their homeworking environments without being aware of the impact it is having on their work or health.

This is where business leaders need to understand what a move to a fully remote or agile/hybrid workforce will mean for the short-, medium- and long-term productivity and efficiency of their business.

Will we see a gradual decline in productivity as homeworking environments take their toll on workforces? Or is hybrid working the right model for the long term?

We believe that having the right data is the best way to answer these questions.

Understanding what’s impacting your people’s productivity

Identifying and understanding potential distractions is very different from the current engagement survey model. We can all be engaged but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re as productive as we could be.

Defining wellbeing as the “The balance point between an individual’s resource pool and the challenges faced”, Dodge et al land on the key standpoint of wellbeing and productivity: balance.

For sustained productivity, it’s important to achieve a balance between a multitude of factors, including physical health, mental health, internal politics or perceived bureaucracy, staff turnover, training, ergonomic or musculoskeletal pain and discomfort, management styles, culture, environmental issues such as noise and heat, equipment, procedures, abnormal task requests and interruptions from other colleagues.

The key is to uncover any and every factor that can impact your employee’s ability at completing their best work and take actionable steps to remove them.

Unlock the productivity of your workforce with data

Our new data driven employee productivity and wellbeing tool, Healthy Working Analytics, will identify what’s distracting your people from delivering their best work through evidence-based wellbeing questions which dig deeper to understand productivity.

Healthy Working Analytics provides data driven reports to help you make the right interventions, which will improve employee wellbeing, increase productivity, and reduce absenteeism/presenteeism.

A small change can make a big difference

For most businesses, efficiency is about marginal gain, not wholesale mutations, with a combination of minor changes adding up to a significant improvement. There will be times when the feedback can have far reaching consequences but if this happens, it’s likely to be deep rooted issues that needed to be uncovered.

When you next consider assessing your workers, think about what you want to know and how can you convince the CEO and CFO to invest in a new wellbeing initiative, sit stand desks or a mental health training programme. You can deliver hard data and statistics that measure and prove the improvement in productivity as a result.

Identify what’s distracting your workforce

To find out how we can help you to identify the distractions, which are preventing your people from delivering their best work,  call  0207 469 0200 or email [email protected].