What are the challenges in measuring the impact of health and wellbeing initiatives?

What are the challenges in measuring the impact of health and wellbeing initiatives?
2) What examples of impact measurement are given in the article?
3) What other organisational imperatives can health and wellbeing support?
Care of staff is top of the agenda
By Alison Maitland ‐ June 3rd, 2005 
Handling more than 3m passenger journeys a day on the capital’s tube system, employees of London Underground frequently find themselves in highly pressured situations.
Three years ago, LU highlighted the costs of stress‐related absence and secured funding for a health plan to tackle it. LU, which receives a “big tick” in this year’s Business in the Community (BITC) awards for
excellence, introduced a stress reduction programme using cognitive behavioural therapy to help employees better understand and cope with stress.
Managers were also given a toolkit including guides on handling stress, advice cards on how to conduct back‐to‐work interviews with staff returning from sickness absence, “relaxation CDs” containing
information and exercises, and a dedicated email address for requests for help with stress problems.
Sickness absence has fallen by considerably more than LU’s initial target. According to figures submitted to BITC, this has generated annual savings of £455,000, equal to a return on investment of 8:1.
The stress programme is short‐listed along with initiatives by six other organisations, including AstraZeneca, Ernst & Young and 3M, for the UnumProvident Healthy Workplaces Award. It is one of three new awards that, combined with many entries to established awards, underline how treatment of employees has become a vital strand of corporate responsibility.
“To be a responsible business today, to engage in the global debate about corporate social responsibility and to blow away the hot air that swirls around the subject, any business needs to start by being a
responsible employer,” says Julia Cleverdon, chief executive of Business in the Community.
“What doesn’t work and doesn’t achieve a positive impact on society is to attempt to bolt social responsibility on to existing structures by throwing time, money and effort at neighbourhood renewal or
the environment while your own people at work are lacking in motivation and skills and your supply chains feel badly treated.”
National Grid Transco, another short‐listed company, found an imaginative way to encourage its 14,000 UK employees to take action to improve workplace health and safety. The international energy delivery
business launched a “safety charity challenge” in which the company donated money to Mencap and Enable, the disability charities, each time an employee identified a hazard at work that was subsequently
removed. The scope was broadened in 2001 to include reducing traffic accidents involving Transco vehicles.
Employees were also able to choose local charities to benefit from half of the donation, with the other half going to Mencap and Enable. Work‐related injuries fell to 117 in 2003‐4, the company’s lowest‐ever annual
figure, from 543 in 1998. The Healthy Workplaces award links into BITC’s newest campaign, Business Action on Health, by recognising different ways in which companies can improve the wellbeing of their employees.
New research conducted for the campaign jointly by BITC and vielife, a consultancy on workplace health and productivity, finds that business leaders are interested in employee health and wellbeing but are
uncertain about how to measure them or indeed about what matters to the business.
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