Aon’s latest paper, “Unlocking the Value of Employee Data” highlights 1) the enormous value that such data can provide and 2) the need for secure and compliant data collection tools and third-party services.
More specifically, the white paper reinforces that workforces with higher wellbeing and resilience, demonstrate lower employee turnover, higher productivity, and improved brand value. Doubling down on this AON state “Wellbeing performance also has a direct impact on company performance, with client satisfaction, profit, innovation, brand image and retention all rising with workforce resilience”.
The other focus of the paper surrounds the issue of data security and compliance when considering employee wellbeing data programmes. In the paper summary, AON wraps up with 5 steps for driving employee resilience via health data. Below we demonstrate how we at ART Health can bring peace of mind to organisations taking these steps into account:
Step 1) Audit the security of technology and benefits providers
The technology we have in place here at ART Health ensures the complete security of all employee data. Accordingly, we take the online and offline security of our client’s information incredibly seriously. We implement rigorous internal and external protocols on a scheduled and real-time basis, ensuring that our software and hardware systems meet or exceed current industry requirements (GDPR). Additionally, we employ a rigorous internal penetration testing schedule to ensure all data is safe, locked tight and beyond the reach of unscrupulous cyber-criminals. Effectively, there is no safer place for your employee data than with us!
Step 2) Assess which employee health data is critical to building a resilient workforce
Collecting personal or health-related data for data collecting’s sake is a complete waste of time and ethically, should have no place in the modern employer’s toolkit. That’s why it’s vitally important that there is a well-thought-out plan as to how the data can be used to inform both individuals and organisations. At ART Health, we employ the principle of data minimisation to ensure that every data point we collect is used to drive actionable outputs. Furthermore, our service ensures that personal data is only accessible at the individual employee level, with organisations only having access to fully anonymous dashboards that help to benchmark the overall wellbeing of their workforce and understand the impact of changes in any workplace experience.
Step 3) Streamline employee health data ecosystems accordingly
Understanding how data will flow throughout an organisation’s ecosystem is vitally important to ensure security. At ART Health, we have implemented a system that is based on Zero Trust, whereby the “least access” principle is designed into our entire service. Additionally, the only data that is ever viewed by our clients is hosted on ART Health servers, is accessed via a cloud-based dashboard, and is completely anonymous and aggregated. As a result, utilising our service to support employee health and wellbeing provision places our clients in both a streamlined AND secure position, removing any need for any personal data to travel through organisational systems.
Step 4) Ensure employees have oversight of their health
To effect change at the individual level, it’s vitally important that employees have access to their own data and that any insight delivered, is bespoke to them. ART Health’s One Wellbeing service does exactly this, providing a range of high-level, through to detailed visualisations of their health data metrics and delivering tailored insight. Subsequently, the app directs them to in-built content (videos, articles, audio) that can be added to their habit-builder section, which supports and encourages them in improving their personal health and wellbeing. Effectively, we ensure that each individual; i) has complete oversight of their health data, ii) can make informed intervention decisions based on their data (not some group or industry average), and iii) can then track the impact of their chosen interventions via the data continually presented back to them.
Step 5) Design dashboards that can inform meaningful people decisions
At the employer level, the ability to make data-driven decisions to improve the workplace experience and employee wellbeing ultimately relies upon the insight derived from the collected aggregate data sets. Additionally, to understand if workplace interventions of any kind are having the desired effect on employee health and wellbeing, it’s important to continually benchmark. This way, if there’s a deviation from the norm in the data, you can start to understand why and make inferences as to what is working, what isn’t and where there are issues. The employer dashboard that we’ve created to support our One Wellbeing service, synergises perfectly with the employee app to provide this data and insight in a simple dashboard format.
