How Do You Measure People Sustainability?

People Sustainability is an organisation’s ability to develop, support and retain a healthy, capable and productive workforce over time. If that’s the goal, you need a way to see whether you’re getting closer to it. You can’t fix what you can’t see.

Why is it so hard to measure?

Because most of the cost hides in plain sight. A resignation shows up as a hiring fee. But the weeks the role sat empty, the overtime the team did to cover it, and the months before the new person is fully up to speed don’t show up anywhere.

The same goes for absence. One sick day is easy to count. A team that’s been running on empty for a year, where people turn up but get half as much done, isn’t.

And a lot of companies already have the data, they just don’t join it up. HR has turnover. Finance has overtime. Managers have a gut feeling. Nobody puts them on one page.

What should you actually track?

Look, you don’t need fifty measures. You need a few that tell you something real.

Who’s leaving, and from where. Not just your overall turnover rate. Which teams, which managers, and how long people stayed. If one manager loses three people in a year and the rest lose none, that’s not a hiring problem.

Absence, by team. Again, the average hides it. A spike in one department usually means something’s wrong in that department.

Engagement and pressure. Short, regular check-ins that ask people how things really are. Not a 60-question survey once a year that nobody acts on.

What leaders see. Do your managers find out about problems early, or only when someone hands in their notice? That gap is a measure in itself.

Why do these measures matter to the bottom line?

• Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores (Gallup, 2015). That’s why a company-wide average tells you so little. The story is team by team.
• In Vietnam, just 9% of employees are engaged, yet only 13% report daily stress and 59% say they’re thriving in life (Gallup, Vietnam country data, 2026 report). Measure stress alone and you’d think everything was fine.
• Boards now have an international standard for this. ISO 30414, the standard for human capital reporting, was updated in August 2025 and now includes workforce wellbeing and productivity measures (ISO 30414:2025).

Those are why measuring this isn’t a soft exercise. One number on its own misleads you, and the real picture sits at team level.

What’s wrong with the annual engagement survey?

Honestly, the problem is usually what happens after it.

People fill it in. The results come back three months later as a big report. Leaders read the headline score, maybe run a workshop, and then it goes quiet until next year. The people who filled it in notice that nothing changed, and next year they either don’t bother or they tell you what you want to hear.

So the measure itself starts lying to you. Not because people are dishonest, but because they’ve learned it doesn’t make a difference.

A better approach is shorter and more frequent. Ask fewer questions, more often, and show people what you did with the answers. When people see something change, they tell you the truth next time.

How do you measure both sides?

People Sustainability works on the organisation and on the person inside it, so the measures have to cover both.

On the organisation side, that’s turnover, absence, how leaders are rated, and whether priorities are clear.

On the human side, it’s how people are actually coping. Their energy, their stress, whether they feel they can speak up, and whether they see a future for themselves there.

If you only measure the organisation, you miss the person who’s about to burn out. If you only measure the person, you miss the manager who’s causing it.

What does good measurement look like in practice?

It follows a simple loop.

Identify. Take a baseline. Where is pressure building, which teams are at risk, and what’s it costing?

Develop. Act on what you found. Train the managers who need it, fix the priorities that aren’t clear, support the teams under the most strain.

Sustain. Measure again, using the same questions, so you can see whether things moved. Then keep going.

The second measurement is the one most companies skip, and it’s the one that proves whether any of it worked.