Three business leaders share how they leverage well-being data  

Employee well-being has moved from the margins of the corporate agenda to become an increasingly important driver of business performance. Amid rapid technological disruption, shifting workforce expectations and continued economic uncertainty, how people experience work can influence productivity, resilience and an organization’s ability to attract and retain talent. But recognizing the importance of well-being is only the beginning.

The bigger challenge – and opportunity – for C-suite leaders is turning workforce data into insights that inform business decisions, and ultimately into action.

Evidence increasingly supports the business case. Research has linked higher employee well-being with stronger firm performance, higher productivity, lower turnover and greater customer loyalty. Workplace well-being data has also been shown to predict measures including sick leave, absenteeism and stock-market performance.

This changes the conversation around measurement. Rather than treating well-being surveys as an annual HR exercise, organizations can use them as a source of business intelligence to identify where workforce risks are emerging, understand the conditions that enable people to perform and inform decisions about leadership, work design and investment.

The question for leaders, therefore, is not simply whether the workforce is happy, but: “What is our well-being data telling us about our organization? And, most importantly, what are we going to do about it?”

Three business leaders share how their organizations are approaching this challenge and turning well-being insights into business value.

Diana Han, Chief Health and Wellbeing Officer, Unilever

"At Unilever, well-being measurement has evolved into a strategic source of insight that helps leaders create the conditions for people and business to thrive.

By bringing together employee listening data, health and well-being metrics, and broader workforce insights, the company has gained a more holistic understanding of what enables sustainable high performance. These insights are increasingly informing decisions about leadership, ways of working, organizational effectiveness and employee support, ensuring well-being is embedded into how the business operates.

This approach has helped position well-being not as a standalone programme, but as a key enabler of resilience, engagement, and long-term business success."

Andrew Gibbons, Group Head of Performance, Wellbeing and Recognition

“At HSBC, we have been measuring colleague well-being through a focused set of measures: satisfaction, sense of purpose and overall happiness. Rather than wait for lagging indicators like financial results, we wanted to see whether these signals could give leaders an earlier picture of organisational health.

What we found was clear: teams with stronger workplace well-being consistently showed stronger performance outcomes – a pattern that held across business units over multiple reporting periods. This tells us that well-being isn’t just valuable in itself; it’s a practical leading indicator of how an organisation is performing.

This insight has helped us focus on what truly moves the needle: clearer strategic direction, leadership behaviours and simplification that removes friction so colleagues can do their best work."

Anna Borg, Head of Psychosocial Health and Well-being, Siemens

“At Siemens, work well-being is a strategic business KPI anchored at the highest level in our DEGREE sustainability framework. Work well-being is a key factor for business success today and it will be even more important in the future. We believe that work well-being enhances quality of life, employability, and business success.

Backed by Oxford University’s evidence-based research, we measure work well-being regularly to catch early warning signs and implement tailored interventions proactively.

To translate strategy into daily reality, we utilize an AI-powered tool that enables leaders to identify and address the drivers of work well-being such as working conditions, health and safety, or opportunities to grow. By combining scientific foundations with data analysis, management and actionable technology, Siemens fosters work well-being as a measurable and actionable enabler for people’s resilience, engagement, productivity, and our long-term business success.”

The experiences of these organizations point to an important evolution in how businesses approach workforce well-being: from measurement to management.

Collecting more data is not the goal. What matters is whether leaders can translate the right data into better decisions. That requires distinguishing well-being outcomes from the workplace conditions that drive them, connecting workforce insights with business priorities and, critically, closing the loop by acting on what employees say. Measurement should prompt leadership action rather than become another performance-rating exercise.

This also requires care. Well-being is multidimensional and deeply human; reducing it to a single dashboard number can obscure rather than illuminate. Quantitative measures should be considered alongside qualitative insights and organizational context, while safeguards are needed to maintain employee trust and avoid unintended consequences such as survey fatigue or metric gaming.

For business leaders, the opportunity is to treat workforce well-being data with the same discipline as other strategic business information because better insight can enable better decisions for both people and performance.

Ultimately, the value of well-being data lies not in what organizations measure, but in what leaders do differently because of it.