The Irish statistic that does not exist

We went looking for a number. A specific one: the proportion of Irish employers who measure whether their wellbeing spending achieves anything. How many organisations, having paid for the app subscriptions, the awareness weeks and the fruit bowls, ever check what changed as a result.

We could not find it. As far as we can establish, no verified Irish statistic exists on how many employers measure wellbeing outcomes. Nobody has counted. And after the initial frustration, we realised the absence is the finding. A country that surveys almost every corner of working life has never thought this question worth asking, which tells you how rarely anyone expects the measuring to be done at all.

A country that measures everything else

Irish organisations are diligent measurers. Payroll to the cent, absence to the half day, turnover, time to hire, engagement scores, energy usage, fleet mileage. If a euro leaves the building, somebody can usually say what came back for it. Wellbeing is the exception. The spend goes out, the posters go up, and the question of what changed is quietly never asked.

Even the field's most quoted numbers show their age. The cost of absenteeism to Ireland has been long estimated at over €1.5 billion, an estimate now more than twenty years old. It is still repeated in almost every wellbeing pitch, ours excepted, because nothing fresher has replaced it. A sector this large is navigating by a figure old enough to have finished school.

Meanwhile the one gap that has been measured is uncomfortable. Deloitte and Workplace Intelligence found in 2022 that 91% of executives believe their people feel cared for at work, while only 56% of employees agree. Spending is happening, and sincerity is real, but the feedback loop that would connect the two is missing. Wellbeing spend, alone among the line items, is bought on hope.

What measuring would even look like

The good news is that measuring this is neither exotic nor difficult. It looks like four ordinary questions asked every month.

Attendance: is the support actually being used, by everyone, or by a self-selecting few? Themes over time: what is the workforce carrying, and is it rising or easing, team by team? Actions taken: what did leadership change last month because of what it learned? Movement: after the change, did the theme ease?

None of this requires a research department. A leadership team that can read a monthly management account can read this. The barrier was never capability. Most wellbeing purchases simply arrive with no feedback loop attached, so there has been nothing to read, and the habit of asking never formed.

That is the whole discipline. It is what our clinicians' anonymised monthly report to leadership, The Listening Post, is built to provide: themes drawn only from groups large enough that no individual could be identified, tracked month on month, alongside the actions taken and whether they moved anything. Over a year it becomes something almost no Irish organisation currently holds, which is evidence about its own people, and evidence that the spend is doing what it was bought to do.

Someday a researcher will finally count how many Irish employers measure their wellbeing outcomes, and publish the statistic we went looking for. When they do, it would be pleasant to be counted on the right side of it.