
Product Case Study: Workforce Insights
Workforce Insights is data collection and analytics tool for organisations looking to engage their workforce with optimised health and wellbeing programmes.
The health and happiness of a workforce, affects the productivity and profit of an organisation. Each absent employee costs their employer an average of £975 in sick pay, lost output, and provision of cover each year (CBI, 2013).Alongside this, presenteeism accounts for 1.5 times more working time lost than absenteeism (Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, 2007) with 78% of employees stating that they would stay long term with a company that cared for employees’ health and wellbeing needs (HR Review, 2015).
However, for a workplace health programme to have a positive impact, it must be tailored to the needs of the employees and the organisation (BMC, 2011). While two thirds of employers are increasing their spending on health and wellness (Edenred, 2015), many of there investments are not aligned with their workforce needs.
Workforce Insights was developed in partnership with several large employers (GoCompare, GE Health, S4C, Sony) to expand their understanding the needs of their workforce. The platform was based on the insights that:
- Many workforce health surveys were not fit for purpose, being long, technical and lacking clear actions
- Health measurement tended to focus on absolutes e.g. ‘what is your weight?’ and not take into account how users perceive their health, or if they had intention to change it
- The surveys were often delivered without strategic alignment or any ongoing measure of success, as the tools available were not agile enough to keep pace
The platform provided a simple, online survey, covering 7 areas of mental and physical wellbeing (bodyshape, physical activity, nutrition, energy levels, work:life balance, happiness, time pressure) in just 3 minutes. The questions focused on Likeart scores of [1–5] for:
- Health satisfaction — how you feel about your health e.g. I’m satisfied with my bodyshape [1–5]
- Health intention — what you are open to changing about your health e.g. I intend to improve my bodyshape [1–5]

This gave a total of 35 questions, taking roughly 3–4 minutes to complete, with demographic data collected at the start. Results were anonymously aggregated into a clear dashboard for managers to plan health and wellbeing investment, whilst individual users received a report to guide them. The system was built using a Microservice Architecture, with a component driven React JS Frontend and RESTful API driven Laravel Backend.

The system was used by dozens of companies and health consultants to improve their wellbeing strategy for thousands of people. The average user rating for the survey was 4.5/5, with surveys often being repeated to create benchmarks and new KPIs for organisational performance.

