Brief leadership on a habit campaign without inventing ROI

One question is whether the campaign worked as a campaign: did people take part, did it hold past the announcement, did it reach the people who normally sit these things out. You can answer that from your own data within a month, and you can answer it precisely.

The other question is whether the campaign changed the business: fewer sick days, better retention, more productive hours. A thirty-day campaign in one company cannot answer that. It needs a comparison group, a window measured in quarters, and a measure you are willing to defend in front of a skeptic. Many published figures in this space don’t clear that bar, so read the method before quoting one.

Saying this out loud in the kickoff meeting protects the campaign. If the outcome question goes unanswered, it gets assumed, and then it gets asked in the review, and by then the only available answer is a number you made up.

If a number appears in a brief, one of two things should be true. It is your own team's data, and you can say exactly how it was collected and over what period. Or it is attributed to a named source with a method and a sample that you have actually read, not just the headline someone forwarded to you.

The failure mode is not usually malice. Numbers travel without their footnotes. A vendor survey of people who already use wellbeing products becomes a claim about all employees. A small self-selected sample becomes an industry benchmark. By the time it reaches slide four, nobody can say who measured what.

The simplest fix is also the strongest: brief on participation, cost and risk, and bring no external numbers at all. If you do cite something, quote it in a form a skeptic can check: who measured it, who was in the sample, over what period, and precisely which thing they measured.

A shared-goal campaign produces a small set of numbers that answer real questions. None of them are outcome claims, and all of them are defensible.

• How many people logged at least one action, out of how many were invited.
• How many logged something in more than one week, which is the only honest signal of a habit forming.
• How many participants had never joined a wellbeing activity at the company before, if you asked the question at sign-up.
• How many encouragements teammates sent each other, which tells you whether it became social or stayed private.
• The team total against the goal, as one line rather than a table of people.
• How many people opted out or asked to be left alone, which is a design signal and not a problem to be fixed quietly.

One page forces the honest version. A deck lets the weak parts hide on a slide nobody pauses on. The structure below is deliberately short enough that any sentence in it can be questioned in the room.

• The ask: one sentence, plus the resource it needs, including People Ops hours per week and any reward budget.
• Why now: the specific observable problem, named without general claims about culture.
• What we measure: the participation list above, with the day on which we will look at it.
• What we will not claim: written down in advance, so the review cannot drift into outcome language later.
• What it costs if it works, including the reward the goal unlocks.
• What happens if it fails: we stop, we say why, and we do not extend it by sending more reminders.

Hepio is in early access with a few pilot teams; it isn’t generally available yet. Asked how much it would improve retention, the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and any tool that claims to know is guessing.

Early stage changes what a pilot looks like, and not in a way that requires apology. You run it small and time-boxed, by hand if you have to, and you report participation. You ask the questions that matter more in a pilot than in a purchase: is participation opt-in by default, what happens to our data at the end of the period, and what exactly does the tool store about a message someone posts. A team that asks those three questions is a better partner than one that asks for a discount.

The same logic applies whether you use a product or a spreadsheet. Brief on what you will count, name what you will not claim, and set a date to decide. That is a document leadership can genuinely say yes to, because it does not rest on a promise you cannot keep.