Developing a KPI for Measuring Staff Wellbeing
The Implications for Australian Law
Abstract
In late 2016, two well-known Australian organisations joined together to produce a new employee wellness index. The national and international firms, Medibank and Deloitte, respectively, promoted the index as enabling firms to measure the collective wellness and wellbeing of their staff. The two firms were of the view that these concepts should become a mainstream issue for boards and management, and form part of CEO accountability to the board. The case was put that responsibility for wellness should become a key performance indicator against which leadership and management performance could be judged. This paper examines the basis for such a proposal in terms of Australia’s system of corporate and tort law. It reviews the implications of a potential employee right to wellbeing. Would this impact, for example, on the established rights and expectations of employees, both individually and collectively? In addition to examining the consequences for relevant law and regulation, this paper reviews the implications in an international context for Australia’s long-established system of shareholder-primacy corporate governance. In particular, does the proposed wellness index invert the shareholder model, and give too much power to employees?
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).