Measuring Health of the Organisation- and the Health of the Nation
Business for Health (B4H) and the CBI ran two round tables at Workforce Wellbeing Live, focussed on ‘Measuring the Health of the Organisation’. Senior industry leaders came together to share how they capture ‘health-relevant data’ that resides in their businesses that could inform the ‘health of the organisation’ but also to help companies improve and benchmark themselves on their contribution to employee health.
John Godfrey, L&G’s Corporate Affairs Director and B4H Chair, highlighted that it is in businesses’ own interests to have a healthier and more productive workforce, and to have a more sustainable business model with products and services aiming for a healthier population and healthier consumers. Business for Health is aiming to devise a good set of metrics that will enable investors to steer companies into valuing health, to bring ‘health’ into ‘ESG’.
Jordan Cummins, CBI’s Health Director, explained that the Workforce Health Index in development and launching towards the end of his year will enable large amounts of data to be collected on the baseline health offer among the UK workforce – and will help to calculate important information to shape government policy and drive up the health offer provided by all of business.
Pamela Gellatly, CEO of Healthcare RM, shared her experience from collecting health data from businesses and advising companies such as Centrica on maximising return on investment of health & wellness plans by measuring their impact on health outcomes. From this experience she has observed how underlying contributory risk factors such as excess weight, inactivity, negative attitudes and beliefs are strongly correlated with conditions like muscular skeletal disorders, mental health problems, digestive issues etc and that wellbeing interventions instead of clinical interventions, or alongside clinical interventions, are far more effective to get people back to work.
Sharlene McGee, Policy Manager at the Health Foundation, added that the upstream social determinants including the quality of employment are the driving causes of both good health and ill health. Healthy life expectancy improvements have slowed in the last decade despite pre-pandemic increased employment levels. There is a clear link between employment and health and it is increasingly recognised that good quality work, encompassing good management practices, working environments, job design and job security are all key factors contributing to health.
James Coldwell, Director of ShareAction’s Workforce Disclosures Initiative, explained that in the case of climate, it's easy to tell who the big emitters and big polluters are, but it's very difficult to do that on the workforce side and measure the ‘S’ in ESG. The WDI aims to help institutional investors compare companies on whether they are delivering good jobs or not; to date have most of the FTSE 100 companies are disclosing their workforce data via the tool (based on a questionnaire with over 130 questions).
Key takeaways from the round table discussion involving large and small businesses as well as public sector employers are:
Proactive wellbeing support is not yet widespread- there is a clear opportunity for business to drive prevention more than it does and intervene earlier before a crisis. Different sets of challenges need different sets of interventions
Companies need support on these critical questions: Do you have a framework/routemap? What should you measure- what data? What is the benchmark- what does good look like? What is the metric? What is the goal of measuring this data?
The service providers have an enormous amount of raw data, but how do you take what they've got into the framework, the roadmap, to measure health? How to draw the data together to measure the right things, the things that matter most to individuals?
Measuring health will be different for the large enterprise compared to the SME. How can you get companies faced with ever-increasing demands to submit data for ESG requests to contribute to yet another data request? How do you simplify for the person that's actually on the ground in an SME, who are busy every day firefighting?
How health is treated as as an investment in the boardroom is incredibly important to this discussion. There needs to be a committed effort from the board – it needs to be at the top of the agenda and part of the culture of the business. Health and wellbeing ‘can’t be done to employees’
Creating the business case is fundamental- you need the data to persuade the CFO, show the impact of improved health outcomes on the bottom line. Businesses will need incentives, especially smaller firms. Disincentives need to be minimised too- like certain interventions being taxed as benefit in kind whereas not others (like psychological counselling for mental health).
Some companies have adopted mechanisms like offering discounts on health premiums in return for companies agreeing to submit quarterly reports on key metrics- which then provides information and evidence to back up the business case to invest in health and reduce health risks (eg if you change health behaviour you move this group of people from medium risk to low risk, and the positive financial impact is x).
NHS is the biggest single employer across the nation-and there is increasing interest in the risk factors that may not manifest themselves until much later in people's careers. Important area to explore is presenteeism- and understanding health and mortality factors in the people who aren't sick.
The difference that employers make in communities is huge- and there is growing interest in the role of ‘anchor institutions’ (including local NHS, employers and businesses) to build up community resilience and access to good work (especially the most disadvantaged and challenged groups, like young people leaving care, those with learning and/or physical disabilities, and veterans). How you collaborate between a big employer and an Integrated Care System with data?
There are limitations and ambiguity with quantitative factors- and there is a need for more qualitative indicators to get the ‘full story’ behind the data (especially in areas lie absenteeism and presenteeism): ‘you can’t have numbers without stories and can't have stories without numbers’.
How can you land on 5-10 key indicators that will make the most difference? Maybe an 80/20 rule: What is the thing that causes 80% of a problem, and ignore the 50 things that causes the 20%. There are also leading indicators: for example, obesity is a massive risk factor in the UK population, and probably one of the biggest in terms of access to employment
These insights will inform our important research underway to develop the Business Framework for Health leading ultimately to a Business for Health Index, to build the evidence base to show how people’s health and wellbeing can be enhanced through inclusive economic development and greater focus on tackling the wider determinants of health.