Discover how the SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing Software Solution Allows Defense and Security Organizations to Monitor and Manage the Welfare of their Personnel in a Holistic Way
Figure 1: Example illustration
1) Thematic Background
Employees are the most important asset of almost every organization. This is even more true for Defense and Security (D&S) organizations, like armed forces, emergency organizations or relief organizations. The personnel of these organizations is typically confronted with high stress situations, high physical strains, and often times also long working hours. What is more, certain employees undergo life threatening situations throughout their career, or experience situations of high psychological stress during missions. Another important aspect of organizational health and wellbeing is physical fitness and injury prevention. What matters in this context is not only having the necessary fitness level to accomplish tasks and missions, but especially also the positive long-term effect on personal health. The importance of organizational health and wellbeing can be further underlined by different statistical data. According to a survey among first responders 85% of them have expected symptoms related to mental health conditions. Another survey shows that emergency responders think of committing suicide twice as often than average adults. Additionally, a survey conducted by the British National Police Wellbeing Service indicates that 69.6% of the British police officers and 56% of police staff have high levels of fatigue, and around 30% even very high levels. However, initiatives that want to promote wellbeing are not limited to the D&S organizations itself. The Firefighters Charity organization in Great Britain is a good example for a private institution, that is dedicated to the wellbeing of British fire fighters. Their services include telephone or online counselling, guided relaxation or reset programs for fire fighters, which are experiencing health problems.
2) The Impact of Health and Wellbeing Problems
Figure 2: Health and wellbeing problems can pose serious threats to D&S organizations
Wellbeing and health issues do not only harm the affected people, but also their employers. D&S organizations in this context typically experience the following difficulties:
1) An Inability to Identify Mental Trauma and Stress
Many D&S organizations find it difficult to recognize and measure stress and potential mental traumas among their staff.
2) Rising Absences of Employees
Employees that are experiencing health problems show more days of sick leave than average workforces.
3) Rising Employee Attrition
When the physical and psychological burdens become too great for staff members, they often decide to leave their employer.
4) Real risk to the Delivery of Service
With extremely high fluctuation rates of up to 30%, Defense and Security organizations start to be confronted with a real risk to the successful delivery of their service.
According to a study published by the nonprofit organization RAND the attrition rate after three years of new recruits of the US military amounts to 29.7% for the US Army and 23.6% for the US Navy. This high labor turnover rates do not only harm the operational readiness of the military, but also lead to significant knowledge loss and costs. The author of the study in this context estimates the turnover expenses for the US Military to up to $479mn for the US Army and to up to $220mn for the US Navy. He also emphasizes in that regard, that the costs for one single enlistment ranges from $11,000 to $20,000. What is more, D&S organizations do also need to consider additional costs for personnel search and selection, onboarding, and training. A similar development can also be seen for emergency services organizations. The ambulance service organizations in the United States of America, for instance, have an overall turnover rate in the year 2021 of between 21% for supervisors and 36% for full-time emergency medical technicians. By contrast, dedicated frontline forces like the British Columbian Wildfire Service in Canada reported a turnover rate of about 25% in 2022. Although there are of course also other reasons why people leave a company or organizations, it is unquestionable that health and wellbeing problems are among the most important ones.
3) How Organizations are Trying to Approach the Problem
Figure 3: Example illustration
Luckily, this problem has not remained unrecognized by the employers. The British Ministry of Defense, for instance, has successfully addressed it by offering stress management courses or access to medical support. Corresponding offers for individual military units, the soldiers’ families, women, or veterans have also been successfully established by the Ministry. Emergency organizations have similarly approached the issue during the recent years. The British National Police, for instance, has created wellbeing solutions like a peer support for wellbeing, wellbeing dogs, or even wellbeing vans, that tour through the country for raising awareness about the topic. However, nowadays many organizations still do not have implemented comparable health and wellbeing solutions for multiple reasons, such as budget constraint, the highly decentralized orientation of their organization or simply a lack of awareness. But this is exactly where SAP wants to come into play with its holistic software solutions for Health and Wellbeing.
4) The SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing Solution
Figure 4: Example illustration
We at SAP are a company with more than 100,000 employees worldwide, and it is absolutely clear for us that our organizational performance depends on the performance of each employee. We for this reason recognized a long time ago how important it is to have a healthy and happy workforce, which is why we created the SAP Solution for Employee Health & Wellbeing. With this software solutions we want to enable our customers to run their organizations in a better, more efficient way, that enables its employees to unfold their full potential while also achieving a better work-life balance. The Employee Health & Wellbeing software suite was build on the foundation of SAP’s decades-long experience in business software solutions for diverse industries, and can be used either as a single solution or as a full enterprise intelligence solution.
5) The Functionality and the Major Benefits of SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing
SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing allows D&S organizations to easily monitor, analyze and improve the wellbeing and health of its workforce. The software solution, as the below illustration shows, is thereby easily integrable into existing systems and is also connectable with diverse other databases, such as HR systems. For measuring the health and wellbeing data of the individual employees, the application uses regular surveys, that are directly transferred into the application. The user then has a data collection of health data for everyone in the case management, which enables him to analyze and monitor it in detail. As a result, the organization can initiate individual mitigation and treatment plans for each employee. These action plans are highly customizable and can for example entail measures, such as medical support, trainings, the assignment of other tasks, vacation, the use of different work equipment or reduced working hours.
Figure 5: The high-level process behind SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing
Our SAP Solution for Employee Health & Wellbeing entails the following helpful characteristics and features for organizational health management:
One Single Platform for Wellbeing and Health Management
Our application allows you to manage all health and wellbeing issues centrally with one single, intuitive platform.
A Digital, Data-Driven Approach
SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing allows you to completely digitize your health management and make related decisions on the foundation of reliable data.
The Provision of Customizable Forms and Surveys for Measuring Wellbeing
Create highly customizable surveys and forms for successfully measuring the wellbeing of your workforce and make use of peer-based triggers.
A Single View of Employee’s Wellbeing
Monitor the wellbeing of each individual employee at a glance, with the ability of integrating employee data from your existing systems. Also easily provide access to the data to authorized groups, such as doctors or physical therapists.
Figure 6: Effective performance diagnostics with SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing
Efficient Human Performance Tracking
Profit from the ability to track the wellbeing of your employees, even of those that are operating in physically demanding environments. Easily integrate all available data sources like, for instance, from medical records over input from coaches to real-time performance data.
Figure 7: Holistic wellbeing tracking
Easy Integration of 3rd Party Applications
Easily integrate 3rd party applications and related services into the application.
Access to Comprehensive Case Management Functions
Make use of an advanced access management solution and easily enable cross agency collaboration.
Advanced Functions for Risk Analysis
Perform detailed risk analyses and trigger interventions based on user-defined indicators.
Discover how Activities Affect your Employees
SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing allows organizations to understand how certain day-to-day activities influence the wellbeing and health of their staff.
Figure 8: User-friendly case management with SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing
As the above benefits show, SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing is a truly holistic health management solutions, that not only allow you to perform better health management, but also to better care for each of your individual staff members. This way your organization can raise the employee satisfaction, better prevent the workforce from injuries and diseases, but also decrease absences and labor turnover. This, of course, also leads to significant cost savings, especially when considering the above-mentioned costs that can arise from fluctuation and health problems. Furthermore, SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing can also be an effective tool for the retainment of experienced employees with individual needs or for attracting new employees.
6) A Role Model for Effective Employee Wellbeing Management: The Australian Police Forces
The Australian Police Forces successfully integrated SAP Employee Health and Wellbeing into their organization. The software solution enabled the D&S organization to record, manage and report all health and wellbeing data with one single platform. In addition, SAP Wellbeing allowed the law enforcement organization to integrate much more health-related processes than initially expected. For example, it was even possible to build individual health management systems for the organization’s police dogs and horses.
Figure 9: SAP Wellbeing is even extendable to police dogs
All in all, the implementation of SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing allowed the Australian Police Forces to:
--> Reduce employee churn by up to 10%
--> Lower HR costs by up to 8%
--> Increase employee engagement by up to 20%
--> Improve HR reporting by up to 10%
7) Why Wellbeing Should not be Ignored by Employers
Although there are many ways how companies and organizations can theoretically manage organizational health and wellbeing, this blog post has hopefully highlighted what the advantages of a scalable and comprehensive software solutions, like SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing, are. The software suite not only allows organizations to manage health matters for every employee with one single solution, but also improves the wellbeing and health of your staff, which in turn also raises organizational performance measurably.
Additional Information
- SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing Video: Let's Talk - Public Services Wellbeing (sap.com)
- Summary of SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing: 4 Page Executive Summary
- L0 Presentation for SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing: L0 Deck
References
Health, Performance and Wellbeing in the Army. (2024). The British Army.
Mental health support for the UK armed forces. (2023, November). UK Government.
Wellbeing vans. (2024). Oscar Kilo.
Injury Prevention. (2024). HPRC.
Mental health. (2024). The Fire Fighters Charity.
Wellbeing Overview. (2023). City of London Police.
Predicting 36-Month Attrition in the U.S. Military: A Comparison Across Service Branches. (2020, April). RAND.
4th Annual Study Shows Worsening EMS Turnover. (2022, October). American Ambulance Association.
Burned out: pressures are taking a toll on wildfire fighters. (2023, August). Canadian Firefighter Magazine.
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