Business guru Peter Drucker famously said that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. That’s why your organization tracks everything from website traffic to sales growth, profit margins to customer acquisition costs. You hate guesswork; you love KPIs.
But if you’re like most companies, there’s a big blind spot in your metrics.
It has to do with people. Not how many you employ, what your average health care spend is, or how high your attrition rate has become. Those are the whats of human resources. They’re straightforward to measure and tricky to change — especially when you’re missing the whys.
Why do we lose new parents to other organizations — or no organizations? Why are so many employees calling in sick? Why are our top performers distracted? Why isn’t the new culture-building effort working?
The answers don’t just lie inside the workplace, but outside of it. After all, people are more than their jobs: They are children, parents, siblings, spouses, neighbors, and friends. They are cooks, commuters, worriers, caregivers, achievers, and insomniacs. Their life experiences affect their work, and by extension, your company’s bottom line.
But if you’re like most organizations, you’re not getting a holistic view of employee well-being. Enter the Thrive XM Index, a first-of-its-kind tool that connects the dots between human experiences and business performance. It combines in-depth employee and company assessments with HR metrics and financial data to enable leaders to understand, predict, and address challenges that can indirectly — but powerfully — affect their results.
Here are just a few ways Thrive can help companies meet their full potential:
Trimming Turnover
Attrition costs time, money, morale, and institutional knowledge. Some studies have pegged the cost of replacing an employee at 1.5x or 2x that worker’s annual salary. Other studies have shown that pay is rarely the reason people quit their jobs. Knowing whether your employees are hungry for learning opportunities, child care support, or flexible schedules is crucial to creating policies that keep them around.
Cutting Health Care Costs
A recent study from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business concluded that stress is the biggest workplace health problem — with the potential to cause more problems than obesity, sedentary living, and even secondhand smoke. The answer isn’t to spend more on prescription programs, but it’s tough to tackle the issue unless you know the source of employees’ stress. Is it long hours? Financial pressure? A culture of micromanagement? Once you know and act, you’ll be looking at lower health care costs and fewer missed days of work.
Moments That Matter
Some of life’s turning points, like starting a new job or taking on your first leadership position, are about work. But many more take place outside the office: a child’s birth, a spouse’s illness, the purchase of a first home. How your company behaves at these crucial moments has a downstream effect on your bottom line, because it has such a potent effect on morale. An expecting parent will never forget being asked to finish a presentation on the way to the hospital — or, conversely, being given flex time to get ready for the new arrival. The Thrive XM Index identifies those crucial junctions for your employees, so you can be there when it matters most — and we’ll be there to offer the technology and insights you need to power change at these critical moments.
Enhancing Your Reputation
Installing a pool table and serving fancy coffee may make you look good to prospective talent — for a while. But in the long term, what matters is having happy, engaged employees. They’ll reduce your recruiting costs and bring the best candidates in the market to your door.
The Thrive XM Index focuses on five key categories of employee experience: career, family, health, financial, and time. Understand those factors and you set your organization up for sustainable success. Neglect them and you’ll risk creating a dysfunctional, disengaged, and underperforming workplace.
The Thrive XM Diagnostic report includes an overall scoring of the people experiences in your organization, a scoring of individual well-being, and an analysis that illuminates the gap between how company leaders think they’re supporting employees and how employees actually feel about their work-life integration. It comes with actionable advice on what areas need to be changed, as well as recommendations for metrics to track going forward to make sure your experience investments are paying off.
The Thrive XM Index is the next frontier in organizational insight — and it’s free for the first year. Sign up for the assessment today.