The secret to understanding employee wellbeing starts with data. Dr Christian van Stolk, Executive Vice President at RAND Europe, is looking to change how organisations understand their employees with the help of data analytics. We met with him to discuss his views on the modern workplace and his most recent research.
What are the benefits for organisations in identifying the needs of differing employee groups? How does this help support better employee wellbeing?
"The first thing to note is that a lot of organisations view their employees as rather homogeneous. Ultimately, what an organisation has is multiple different subcultures, functions and influences. The problem lies with organisations who are unable to understand these differences.
"For instance, large organisations often don’t make a distinction between back office, front office, and the different ways employees work. So, if you collect data to enable you to cluster employees by their work behaviours, you do come up with quite distinct employee types. And that's important, because it gives management a better sense of employee characteristics. In an NHS context where you might have nurses and doctors, you can probably see very different working patterns within those groups. And that is important.
"If people are working in fundamentally different ways, it's logical that what you provide them in terms of health and wellbeing might have to differ for different groups. The way that you support your employees could also be quite different if targeted to various employee types.
"We should also look at this from a managerial perspective. Giving senior employees the information and tools necessary to effectively manage their resources – in this case, people – will improve company culture and employee satisfaction. At the most extreme, we're talking about a greater degree of personalisation in terms of how we manage people within an organisation. Approaches like this also allow line managers more responsibility for managing and spending when it comes to support for their direct reports.
"On the flip side, if you're thinking about the link between wellbeing and productivity outcomes (as we typically do in our analysis at RAND) it also means that you will have more job retention and less turnover, things that managers often spend an awful lot of time on. So, you might ask managers to invest more time in one area, but it should hopefully save them time elsewhere as you will have more engagement, better job retention, and this will drive productivity."
Data is an important part of assessing employee wellbeing, but is it being used effectively to improve wellbeing?
"There are always different limitations when it comes to gathering data. I think there is definitely a data gap in the UK. Take insurance claim data, for instance. You use HR data, but when you combine this with Microsoft data, it becomes a powerful mix. What’s missing is NHS data, as you will never have a complete picture of somebody’s health and the data will always be incomplete.
"Ultimately, what I find to be the greatest limitation is not imperfect data, because that's a given; especially as a researcher, imperfect data and missing data are huge parts of my job. It's the capacity of people within organisations to make sense of the data that is the gamechanger. It's interesting to think about how important data is becoming in our day-to-day life, but our capacity to analyse it is not increasing at the same rate – even larger organisations struggle with having the analytical capacity and ability to examine data."
The way that organisations and employees are thinking about health data and the data they have is changing. How do you feel these changing attitudes are impacting how organisations collect and store employee data?
"Organisations are collecting a lot of information about their employees, sometimes without them knowing, and often there is a health component within that. So, when I typically go into an organisation and ask them about what kind of health and wellbeing data they have, they show me what is obvious, and then I start asking about all the other stuff that they might be collecting as well. Organisations collect masses of data, which can tell us increasingly more about critical factors, such as what's going on in the workplace, as well as the health and wellbeing of employees. An analogy I often make is going into a boardroom setting – you probably know exactly how much you're spending on your team, when it's up or when it's down, and how it's performing, but you'd have no clue about the individual people.
"Ultimately, we're collecting ever more data in this space. It's often about how you structure that data, create performance metrics, and how you operate with your employees to achieve this. There's clearly some ethics surrounding these topics, which employers are not always entirely comfortable with. They begin to ask whether employee consent has been provided, what the purpose of the data is, what they are collecting these types of things for, and how they can analyse it.
"That is a fundamental issue. And as we're navigating this new data landscape, the question of consent will come up again and again. There is a responsibility for providers, employers, and third-party user research organisations to determine how we do this going forward. And, sometimes you find that employees are misinformed or uninformed in the middle of all of this. That's why it’s also important to educate employees, in terms of getting them to take more responsibility for their data.
"My hope for the future is that some of this data will actually start changing organisational culture, and the debates we're having around health and wellbeing. But there's also a flip side. We need to remain aware that there's also a possibility of data getting misused, and we need to guard against that."
