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Work toolkit · Measurement
What to measure [WORKSHEET]
Who this is for: HR, People and benefits leaders who need to show something at the next review, and internal champions who need to keep a program alive past its first enthusiastic quarter.
How to use it: Fill in the baseline column this week with whatever you can get from HRIS and your benefits provider. Leave the rest blank. Review one quarter later. A baseline you can beat is worth more than a dashboard you can't build.
Start with two, not twelve
Pick one retention number and one reach number. Everything else is a nice-to-have that will delay you by two quarters.
- Retention, ages 45–60. Voluntary exits in that band as a share of headcount in that band, compared with your organization-wide voluntary exit rate. You already have both halves in your HRIS. If the band is meaningfully worse than the whole, you have your business case and you didn't have to survey anyone.
- Reach. Attendance at the awareness session, plus unique views of the policy page. Reach tells you whether people know it exists. Retention tells you whether it mattered. Neither works alone.
The baseline worksheet
Fill the middle column today. Leave the right column empty until the review date, and write the review date down now.
| Measure | Baseline (today) | Review (+1 quarter) |
|---|---|---|
| Headcount aged 45–60 | __________ | __________ |
| Voluntary exits, 45–60, last 12 months (%) | __________ | __________ |
| Voluntary exits, all staff, last 12 months (%) | __________ | __________ |
| Managers who have had the training (%) | __________ | __________ |
| Awareness-session attendance (count / % not in the 45–60 band) | __________ | __________ |
| Policy page views, last 90 days | __________ | __________ |
| Adjustment requests granted, and median days to grant | __________ | __________ |
| Benefits: is MHT/HRT covered? Pelvic physio? Counselling? | Y / N / N | __________ |
Review date: ______________ Owner: ______________
Do not measure these
- Who is menopausal. Not by name, not by inference from age, not by benefits claim. You do not need a register to run a good program, and building one creates a legal and human risk you cannot unbuild.
- Individual symptom data. If a vendor offers you symptom-level reporting on your own employees, that is a reason not to sign. Aggregate, anonymized and thresholded, or nothing.
- Anything with a cell size under ten. "Three people in the Halifax office" is not anonymous. Suppress it.
- A wellbeing score. A single composite number implies a precision nobody has and invites a target nobody should be chasing.
Asking people, without making them disclose
If you run a pulse survey, ask about the workplace, not the body. Four questions, anonymous, no age band finer than a decade, and free-text optional:
- I know where to find our menopause policy. (agree / neutral / disagree)
- If I needed a practical adjustment, I would feel comfortable asking my manager. (agree / neutral / disagree)
- Health topics like this can be raised here without it affecting how I'm seen. (agree / neutral / disagree)
- What is one small change that would make your working day easier? (optional free text)
Question 2 is the one that matters. In the Canadian survey, 67% said they would not feel comfortable telling their supervisor. Moving that number is the program.
Writing it up for a finance audience
Four lines. Not a deck.
- The gap: "Voluntary exits in the 45–60 band ran at X% against Y% across the organization."
- The cost, stated honestly: use your own replacement-cost assumption, name it as an assumption, and show the arithmetic. Do not borrow a headline national figure and divide it by your headcount — someone will ask, and they should.
- The spend: policy and templates are free; the real cost is manager training time and any benefits change. Put the hours in the paper.
- The proof point: one before/after number and one unattributed quote from the free-text field.
Context figures throughout: Menopause Foundation of Canada × Deloitte, 2023 (Leger survey, n=1,023 Canadian women aged 40–60), which estimates $3.5B a year in lost economic activity and 540,000 lost work days nationally. It does not publish a per-employee figure, and neither should you.