Chief innovation officer argues well-being initiatives need clear KPIs
Despite most organizations looking to AI to see what the future of work may look like, Faizal Mitha emphasizes that's the wrong place to begin. Rather, all eyes should be focused on the inside of the workplace.
"You would assume that everybody would say the future of work involves artificial intelligence. Of course that's going to be a part of it, but really the future of work is maximizing and optimizing the human capital that you have," said Mitha, chief innovation officer at HUB International.
“We don’t see well-being as an employee perk anymore because we’re really trying to share data on investments in employee well being, how it’s tied to productivity and even sort of growth in the capital markets compared to companies that don't focus on well being. So it's not just an HR sort of ancillary piece. It's actually something that should be in the hearts and minds of finance and CEOs as well,” he added.
Mitha has spent the past year making a case that employee well-being isn't a soft initiative parked inside HR. It's a business performance lever — one that affects turnover, disability costs, succession planning, and even company valuations, he argues.
"First of all, don't call it well-being," he added. "Call it something that really unlocks the productivity, turnover, succession, organizational risk."
According to Mitha, plan sponsors are overlooking retirement plan enrollment patterns, specifically drop-off patterns, noting that when employees stop contributing to their retirement savings, essentially passing up employer-matched free money, it points to underlying financial strain.
From there, it connects to anxiety, which disrupts sleep, and chronic sleep deprivation raises the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 50 per cent in people getting fewer than seven hours a night, noted Mitha.
The downstream effect lands on workplace productivity, but organizations rarely trace the problem back that far. Instead, he suggests managers flag the employee as a performance issue, missing the underlying health and financial conditions driving the behaviour in the first place.
In Mitha’s view, that same blind spot shows up in how plan sponsors respond to rising drug costs, noting that when an Ozempic claim appears on a benefits plan, the conversation typically jumps straight to cost containment. While Mitha argues that's treating the symptom, the more useful question is what conditions inside the organization contributed to that claim appearing at all. That's where he suggests targeted wellness programs, designed around actual workforce data, become a business decision rather than an HR amenity.
According to Mitha, building smarter well-being strategies is through data. Specifically, identifying the problem of where it lives.
“Right now, that data sits in very different places in an organization,” he said. “You have your RSP enrollment data in one spot, you have your disability data in your other spot. You have workplace safety in a different area. You have your claims experience in a different area. So I think it really starts with getting all those disparate data sets into a single source where you can actually start to view and start to build a business case around what's going on.”
Once consolidated, Mitha recommends a baseline persona analysis drawn from human resources information system (HRIS) data. The idea, Mitha underscores, is to segment the workforce the way a marketing team segments customers, like identifying distinct groups, understanding their circumstances, and figuring out how to reach them.
“Ultimately what we're trying to do here is to deliver programs that resonate with our employees. And you don't know how to target them until you can actually segment them and understand who you're dealing with and how to reach them,” said Mitha.
Yet according to Mitha, he highlights two consistent mistakes that organizations make when building data-driven well-being strategies - the first is starting without a clear objective.
Mitha said leaders need to look at their own workforce data and decide what specific metric they're trying to change, “is it turnover, is it succession, is it disability costs?”
The second mistake, he suggests, is outsourcing strategy to vendors, noting how too frequently a mental health program gets pitched, the organization signs on, and then nobody defines what success actually looks like or holds the vendor accountable for delivering it. The issue isn't that mental health is the wrong priority because most organizations have legitimate mental health challenges in their workforce that need attention.
To that end, Mitha identifies three factors that separate organizations with temporary well-being gains from those that build lasting cultures of health. The first is authentic senior leadership buy-in, not just lip service, pointing to E&Y’s decision to create a chief well-being officer, as an example of what that commitment looks like at the top.
The second is equipping direct managers to translate strategy into daily employee experiences. The third is a combination of data proficiency - knowing the KPIs that matter - and setting short-term and long-term targets to track whether interventions are moving the needle. When these three strands weave together, Mitha argues, well-being shifts from a side benefit to a core driver of business performance.
“Nobody actually holds their feet to the fire for that vendor to really determine the KPIs that we're trying to accomplish,” said Mitha. “Are we trying to intervene on absence costs? Are we trying to intervene on drug costs? Are we trying to intervene on the number of sick days? The key part there is like, how do we establish a KPI that all the stakeholders have agreed to and then we can measure our intervention against that KPI. And that's where the HR initiative really ties into a regular finance investment, where you're sort of expecting an ROI rather than just sort of a feel-good thing that ‘Hey, we're covering mental health and now we can check a box and move on.’"
