Here's a question I love asking HR and People & Culture leaders: how do you know your wellbeing program is working?
Often the answer is a list of what's been delivered. Three workshops this quarter. A webinar for Mental Health Month. A new policy. A fruit box. Good things, all of them. But when I ask how people's experience of work has actually changed, the room tends to go quiet.
That's the gap I see most often: wellbeing built around activities rather than impact.
Busy isn't the same as better
It's easy to measure activity. Sessions run, emails sent, attendance numbers. It's much harder, and much more useful, to ask whether anything has shifted for the people doing the work.
A full wellbeing calendar can sit right alongside a team that's still exhausted, still not speaking up and still quietly looking for the exit. When that happens, it's not that wellbeing "doesn't work". It's that the program was designed around what to do, not what to change.
Start with the outcome
A strategic approach flips the order. Before you book a single session, get clear on what you want to be different in six or twelve months. Then choose the activities most likely to get you there.
Some examples of what that shift can look like:
- From "We ran a resilience workshop" to "People tell us they have practical tools to manage pressure, and use them."
- From "We promoted the EAP" to "People feel comfortable asking for help early, before things reach crisis point."
- From "Managers did wellbeing training" to "People feel safe raising concerns with their manager and trust they'll be heard."
- From "We had a team-building day" to "Collaboration across the team feels easier, and people genuinely look out for each other."
- From "We wrote a workload policy" to "Roles are clear, expectations are realistic, and people can switch off at the end of the day."
What you can actually measure
Impact doesn't have to mean complicated data. A few simple measures, tracked over time, tell you a lot:
- Pulse survey questions such as "I can switch off after work" or "I feel comfortable raising concerns with my manager", asked every quarter
- Unplanned leave and sick days, and whether they're trending up or down
- Turnover and exit feedback, especially mentions of workload or burnout
- Repeat participation: do people come back to sessions because they found them useful?
- Psychosocial hazard reports and conversations: are issues being raised earlier?
- Simple feedback after each session: what will you do differently this week?
None of these need a big budget. They just need deciding on upfront, so you can see what's changing.
Why it matters now
In Victoria, employers now need to actively identify and manage psychosocial risks like high job demands and poor support, and review whether their controls are working. An outcomes-focused approach fits naturally with that. I wrote more about the new rules in Psychological health is now the law in Victoria.
Source: PwC and Beyond Blue, Creating a mentally healthy workplace: Return on investment analysis, 2014
How I work with teams
When I design a program with an organisation, we start by agreeing what success looks like for your people. Then we build sessions, offsites and practices around those outcomes, and check in along the way to see what's shifting.
If you're not sure whether your current approach is making a difference, my checklist Is your wellbeing program a tick-box? 5 signs is a good place to start.
So, what outcomes are you using to judge whether your wellbeing strategy is working? I'd love to hear.