Measuring the impact of your mental health programs: a guide for HR professionals

March 10, 2025
9:49 am
Anastassia Murašina

“Addressing mental health at work effectively will help prepare for the future of work and a changing world”. That sentence can be found in the foreword of the 2022 Guidelines on Mental Health at Work by the World Health Organization. It was true three years ago, and it is still true today.

This report links mental health with increased presenteeism, decreased productivity, and high turnover. They recommend three levels of programs to support mental health in the workplace: at the organizational, managerial, and employee levels.

While more companies (about 75% of Tech companies) now recognize the importance of mental health and implement a level of support through different types of tools and programs, very few employees actually use those resources.

This poses the question: How can the impact and effectiveness of these programs be measured?

Setting Clear Objectives and Key metrics

Before you start, decide what to measure and why. What is the goal of implementing mental health programs in your company, and how do these align with your organisation’s priorities?

You can set a mix of goals regarding:

Employee Well-being Indicators include stress levels, job satisfaction, and work-life balance satisfaction.
Organizational Performance Metrics, such as absenteeism rates, employee turnover or productivity levels.
Program Engagement and Utilization, such as participation rates in mental health initiatives and usage rates of mental health resources and tools.

Here are some examples of common objectives and corresponding key metrics.

Objective: Reducing stress in the workplace.

As stress is one of the primary mental health issues at work, aiming to lower stress levels among employees is a very relevant objective.

Key metric: workplace errors or accidents linked to stress, as well as absenteeism due to stress.

Objective: Increasing attendance and productivity.

Key metrics: absenteeism and presenteeism rates, as well as turnover rate, by monitoring voluntary departures.

Objective: Encouraging program participation

Key metrics: The percentage of employees participating in mental health programs, workshops, or using resources, which can be monitored through the HR dashboard of the Siffi app.

Promoting work-life balance

Key metrics: Assess the adoption rates of flexible work policies and their impact on employee satisfaction through surveys and feedback loops.

Demonstrating ROI of the program

Key metrics: Compare program costs against benefits such as reduced absenteeism, improved productivity, or lower turnover rates.

Data Collection Methods

Once you have decided what you want to focus on (try to pick only a few to start with), it is time to plan out how you will collect the data and how often.

Surveys and Feedback are the usual suspects. They are relatively easy to set up and spread out. However, they must be tailor-made and regularly updated to avoid “form fatigue” from your employees. You will want to send out pre- and post-program surveys and give the option for the responses to be sent anonymously to increase response rates and chances of getting honest answers.

Quantitative Data Analysis. This can be done by tracking your absenteeism numbers, monitoring your healthcare-related cost and turnover rate and comparing them with the period before you implemented the program and post-program launch.

Qualitative Assessments will require the most time as they will require focus groups or one-on-one interviews, but they will also give you high-quality responses and feedback that will help you adjust and tweak the program much better. These can be done a few months after launch to assess the usage of the resources and tools.

Regardless of the methods you choose, you need to establish a baseline against which you can benchmark your results. That is your pre and post-program launch assessments.

Regarding the tools you want to use for these assessments, you can manually keep track of them in spreadsheets or use the in-app trackers and dashboards from your service provider, such as Siffi. If you want to track more than what is on the dashboard and keep everything in one place, you can use our template for KPI tracking here by saving your own copy and adapting it to your specific needs.

Using the Data

Once you start gathering data and feedback, it is time to put them to work and use those insights to refine and improve your program and initiatives to meet your employees’ needs better. But do not change everything at once. Only adjust one thing at a time to be able to measure the results accurately.

It is also important to keep updating each initiative’s cost-saving and productivity gains.

We live in a world where data is king. If we want to live well in that world, it is necessary to start measuring mental health initiatives to prove that they are essential for the overall health of the whole organization.

Want to know more about how Siffi is helping organisations? Check out our services

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Measuring the impact of your mental health programs: a guide for HR professionals

Setting Clear Objectives and Key metrics

Data Collection Methods

Using the Data

Anastassia Murašina

Talk to an Expert