How to Monitor the Wellbeing of your Remote Employees

Most business claim that they care about their employee’s wellbeing, but how many are actually monitoring it?

A poll found that 61% of employers are not monitoring how their wellbeing strategies are affecting their staff.

This means that these companies could be facing a loss in productivity, engagement and retention all because of a few possible reasons:

1. They don’t understand how remote work can impact wellbeing
2. They don’t see the importance in monitoring wellbeing.
3. They’re not sure how to properly monitor wellbeing.

So in this post, we’re going to cover all three of these points and give you a 5-step process to help you successfully monitor the wellbeing of your remote workers.

How can remote work impact wellbeing

Remote working can affect members of your teams in different ways. For some, it has massive benefits, such as:

• Improved work-life balance
• Saving costs on travel
• Less commuting time
• The ability to enjoy their home comforts
• Greater flexibility

But for others, it can impact their wellbeing in more ways than one. Some of these include:

• When workers are separated from their colleagues, some suffer the feeling of isolation and loneliness.
• Remote employees tend to work longer hours, which is a huge contributing factor to burnout and illness.
• They can often find it hard to separate work from home life, making it harder to switch off.

Why it’s important to monitor your employee’s wellbeing

If you’re going to neglect your employee’s wellbeing, over time, their problems are probably going to worsen and eventually, they could end up leaving.

To show you how worrying the situation is, mental health research from Deloitte revealed that the cost to employers for poor mental health has increased from £46 billion in 2019 to £56 billion in 2020.

That’s a huge jump year-on-year! It’s clear that employers could do more to monitor and support their employees. But before you can do anything to help them, you need to know how to monitor their wellbeing from the start. So here’s our simple 5-step guide for you to follow:

5 steps to successfully monitor the wellbeing of your remote workers

Step 1: Have the right software in place

If you’ve got a larger team, it’s going to be pretty difficult trying to keep on top of everyone’s wellbeing and understand the problems they’re facing, especially when trying to do so remotely.

Luckily there are useful tools that allow you to gain greater insights into how your remote teams are feeling, allowing you to monitor their wellbeing at a glance.

Analytics 365 is one of those tools. It is an extension for Microsoft Teams that creates custom dashboards to monitor employee wellbeing. With our software, you can:

• Usage Analytics – Measure which employees are working out of hours (a huge cause for burnout).
• Chat Analytics – Gain insights into chat sentiments and reactions to understand better how they’re feeling and their pain points.
• Meeting Analytics – See how much time is spent in meetings. Their lack of interaction could potentially be causing social isolation.
• Call Analytics – Ensure they are catching up and regularly collaborating within the business, allowing them to build effective relationships.

Now you’ve got the right software in place, you need to look at some measurables that will give you an indication of how they’re doing.

Step 2: Set some benchmarks

You can’t understand how your employees are feeling unless you know which metrics to measure and what you’re going to compare the results with.

Start off by setting out the things that will give you an idea about their wellbeing, such as:

• How much overtime they’re doing.
• The amount of time they’re spending in meetings.
• Their engagement levels.
• The amount of sick days they have.

Now it’s time to start setting some benchmarks to see if their behaviour is going to affect their wellbeing. The benchmarks need to be specific, measurable, realistic and timed. As an example, if you want to find out how much overtime they’re doing:

Benchmark: If employees average 35 hours or more overtime from the start of January to the end of January, this is a cause for concern for their wellbeing.

Specific – We are measuring a specific number of hours for a metric that’s going to be tracked inside a specific date range.

Measurable – With Analytics 365, our dashboards can tell you which teams are working out of hours and for how long.

Realistic – 35 hours overtime a month is 8.75 hours a week, which is around the UK average.

Timed – We’re looking at months worth of data, which can be be compared with other months with the same number of days.

With these benchmarks in place, you have some justifiable reasons to believe their wellbeing is improving or getting worse.

Step 3: Schedule weekly check-ins

You don’t want to be missing out on the things that could be impacting your team’s wellbeing on a daily and weekly basis.

Having a weekly check-in is important as this will give you the chance to discover any potential problems much faster.

Here’s how to monitor their wellbeing through a weekly check-in:

1. Schedule a video call that lasts around 30 mins.
2. Avoid asking questions directed at their wellbeing, such as ‘’are you feeling burnt out this week?’’ There’s a good chance they’ll be put off by these questions and not answer them truthfully.
3. Instead, keep it casual and keep the conversation flowing with easy questions, such as ‘’hows your week going?’’.
4. Make it relatable. Tell them when you’re feeling stressed or tired at work. If you’re open about your feelings, they’re more likely to open up about theirs.
5. Look and listen carefully to their tone of voice and facial expressions. Do they look tired? Does their tone of voice sound different to what it normally does? These are key areas for you to get an idea on how they’re feeling.
6. Take some notes AFTER each call about the meeting. This will allow you to spot if it is a consistent problem or just a momentary lapse.

If it seems like your employees are sensitive about discussing their wellbeing, don’t worry. It might just take some time to build enough trust for them to open up to you. Especially if they’ve never met you in person or they’re a newer member of staff.

To get around this, it’s worth sending out a questionnaire that gives them a chance to answer these questions anonymously in their own time. This will feel less intrusive and could give you the insight you want. This takes us on to step 4.

Step 4: Send out a Workplace Wellbeing Questionnaire

We recommend sending out a Workplace Wellbeing Questionnaire each quarter. If you’re not sure what questions to ask, here is a Question Bank for you to pull some ideas from.

Make sure to let your employees answer anonymously, if they feel like they could be seen negatively for highlighting their issues, they are less likely to be honest.

When your employees return the questionnaires, don’t just give them a quick read, tally up their answers in a spreadsheet.

For a question such as: ‘’During the last 12 months, have you felt unwell as a result of work related stress?’’ If out of 50 questionnaires, the majority of your employee’s answer ‘’yes’’ then you know there’s a wellbeing problem at a team or organisational level.

Even if only a few people answered yes, keep an eye open because there’s nothing to say that this could quickly rise by the time the next questionnaire is sent out.

Step 5: Create some reports

If you’ve managed to collect 6-12 months of data using Analytics 365, we would suggest creating reports to get a solid understanding of how your team’s wellbeing has changed throughout the year.

If you want to go a step further, use your results from the quarterly questionnaires and compare them with the reports. If you notice that the results from the questionnaires don’t quite match up to the reports, then there’s 3 potential reasons:

1. Trust needs to be built for them to give you truthful answers.
2. You might need to reconsider the questions you’re asking.
3. You’re not understanding the correlation between their behaviour and answers.

Summary

So these are our 5-steps for monitoring the wellbeing of your remote employees. We know that wellbeing should be a top priority for any organisation. Otherwise the increase in sick days and staff turnover will only make the costs more severe for employers.

Here’s our step-by-step at a glance:

Step 1: Have the right software in place

Step 2: Set some benchmarks

Step 3: Schedule weekly check-ins

Step 4: Send out a Workplace Wellbeing Questionnaire

Step 5: Create some reports

If you’re ready to take your next read about remote working, check out our posts on How To Monitor Remote Employees Without Being A MicroManager and Tips For Managing Remote Teams.