Health and wellbeing at work is a hot topic.

As businesses compete for a seemingly ever smaller talent pool, being able to boast a genuine sense of wellbeing at your workplace can be a big draw.

Similarly, the growing awareness around employees’ mental health and the cost of absences has spurred many companies to look seriously at ways to ensure people are happy at work.

But how do you know what issues you need to address? And how do you know whether what you are doing is working?

A new Cumbrian business is working with employers to survey their employees’ sense of wellbeing and help ensure they are taking the right action.

The KAYA Wellbeing Index grew out of PhD research carried out by Dr Ram Raghavan during research for his PhD in human capital measurement at the University of Manchester.

As part of this, Ram examined which questions were most effective to ask when gauging people’s wellbeing at work.

He analysed hundreds of questions that were asked as part of wellbeing surveys and then boiled them down to those that gave the most insight.

He identified 12 questions covering subjects including their relationships with managers, management of wellbeing at work and their sense of wellbeing in areas such as finance, physical wellbeing and socialising and how much support they get from their employer.

These questions were then used to survey staff at companies including Hilton, Centrica and Volvo, with the resultant data aggregated and given to employers as a report detailing how well they are performing in key areas and what they can do to improve.

As part of the survey, staff are also asked to select what type of support they may like to access.

In August 2020 Ram began developing the commercial potential for the approach with Dr Lee Williams, who lives in Cockermouth, after the pair met at Alliance Manchester Business School.

“What we really ask is how happy you are with the way your company are looking after your wellbeing,” says Lee, who is the company’s co-founder and chief commercial officer alongside Ram who is its chief executive.

“The main thing people want to feel is that they are looked after by their employer.”

They have now launched the KAYA Wellbeing Index as a software as a service model and are working with a number of clients in the UK and overseas, including Saudi Arabia.

Lee, who had previously worked in the employee benefits industry, says his experience taught him how companies will sometimes introduce wellbeing measures, even though they are not actually addressing the specific issues in their workplace.

He calls this kind of action “wellbeing washing”, whether it is being done intentionally or not.

“Essentially we can help tell people if they are wellbeing washing,” says Lee.

“Sometimes people may not be wellbeing washing on purpose, but they could be wasting their investment.

“If you really want to find a solution then you have to begin from the idiosyncratic data and then build that up. It’s about matching the right solution to the issues people are raising.”

Employers sign up to the service online and automated surveys are then sent out to employees.

They can then choose to have the data analysed on a company, team or individual level, depending on how much detail they require.

KAYA is also able to measure the impact of any interventions employers take by repeating the survey over time.

“Our niche is the ability to measure and signpost, it’s not the ability to solve,” says Lee.

“There are lots of people out there who can solve wellbeing issues. Matching them to the problem is the challenge. There are a whole plethora of wellbeing solutions out there but how to use them and when - that’s our space.”

With sickness absences costing employers as much as £100bn a year in the UK, according to some research, Lee says businesses are taking the issue seriously.

"The vast majority of business owners and leaders understand the commercial benefit of having a well and fit workforce," he says.

“There is a human energy crisis and it’s costing us more than the actual energy crisis.

“People’s sense of wellbeing tends to centre around trust and value and involvement. If the company and managers can give them that, then you will see an uplift in the reported wellbeing score.”