Working Well is an ongoing series from BusinessDesk in partnership with Southern Cross Health Insurance, exploring the issues that shape employee health and wellbeing – and the practical solutions for happier, healthier workplaces.
Health trackers have moved well beyond nudging us to stand up and counting our steps.
Many of us now wear them on our wrist, finger or arm. They track sleep, heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, respiration, activity and recovery, and more.
That gives them a potentially useful role in workplaces wrestling with burnout, absenteeism and wellbeing. But it also presents a thorny question: who gets to see the data?
Australian researcher and stress, sleep and recovery expert Dr Jemma King has worked with biometric data in elite sport, military and corporate settings.
She believes wearables can reveal physiological strain that even high performing people are good at ignoring. But they can also generate anxiety, dodgy conclusions and a surveillance problem if employers get carried away.
From steps to stress
The original fitness trackers were blunt instruments. They counted steps, estimated calories and delivered a slightly smug buzz when you hit a daily goal.
Today’s rings, watches and straps promise something much more intimate. They claim to show whether last night’s wine has trashed your sleep, if hard training is tipping into overtraining, and even whether you may be getting sick.
For a chief executive, it is less about hitting the 10,000-step target and more about readiness.
Can you make good decisions, handle conflict and stay measured in the boardroom after a poor night’s sleep or a punishing travel schedule?
King calls executives “cognitive athletes”.
“You’ve got to be taking care of your brain in the same way an Olympic athlete is taking care of their body,” says King, who works as an external adviser to McKinsey & Co and is a fellow at the University of Queensland School of Psychology.
“These metrics will give you an indicator of how well you are thinking, how hard you can push, or how much rest you need.”
That does not mean a red score on a Whoop, Oura, or Apple Watch should cause alarm. King says users should begin with a simple question: what are you trying to improve?
“Do you want to improve sleep or stress or energy? Are you training for an event? Are you trying to recover from some kind of disease, or are you trying to avoid burnout?” she says. “Starting with a clear purpose is a really good idea.”
A paper set to be published soon that was co-written by Amy Edmondson, the Harvard professor who coined the term “psychological safety”, and conducted in conjunction with McKinsey, involved two in-field studies that tracked 143 senior leaders for four to six months with wearables, daily cognitive tests and daily surveys from the leaders and their direct reports.
The results showed that a leader’s total sleep time predicted how they led the next day. After a longer night’s sleep, leaders reported lower stress, sharper concentration and better leadership performance, says King.
On days after a leader slept more, their direct reports said they felt more psychological safety and more confident speaking up in meetings with their boss.
King says the research shows how much leader recovery is an organisational issue.
The perception gap
The real value of wearables is not that they know us better than we know ourselves. It is that they can expose patterns we would otherwise miss.
People are poor historians of their own sleep, energy and stress. We normalise the slow slide into exhaustion.
We remember a good night, forget three rough ones, and tell ourselves we are fine because there is another meeting to get through.
King sees a “huge perception gap” between what people feel and what biometric data says, assuming the device is accurate.
She points to the person who insists five coffees do not affect their sleep.
“Even though you don’t feel it, you are having all of these micro-arousals from the caffeine,” she says. “You think you’re sleeping through, but when you actually look at the data, your sleep disturbances are way above average.”
Business leaders can be particularly good at shutting out body signals.
“CEOs have been trained to disassociate from this somatic messaging to get through work, to get through uni, to get through just being boss,” King says.
“They can be very bad at listening.”
That can have serious consequences. King recalls putting a senior executive at a major Australian sporting organisation on a Whoop programme.
The man, in his 50s, had exceptionally high heart-rate variability and was pleased with the result.
“I said to him, ‘I think you should actually go and see a cardiologist,’” King says. “As it turns out, he actually had atrial fibrillation.”
Wearables do not diagnose illness. But they can provide a reason to seek a proper medical opinion.
Useful, with caveats
The data has practical value when used as a personal baseline.
King advises users to run small experiments and compare themselves with their own past performance, rather than chasing generic targets or competing with colleagues.
Heart-rate variability, or HRV, is a classic trap. It is influenced by age, sex, fitness and other individual factors.
“You should absolutely never compare HRV with anyone except for your yesterday self,” King says.
Sleep consistency is often more useful than a single big sleep score. King’s work with an Arctic-based military group found participants who kept regular bedtimes were less homesick and more resilient.
For busy workers, that means aiming for a reasonably consistent sleep window during the week, not trying to compensate for a punishing Friday with an extravagant Sunday lie-in.
But the tech has limits. King says validation research she did while consulting for the Australian Institute of Sport found many devices unreliable, especially older models.
Fit and placement matter. Rings can shift as fingers swell or shrink with temperature, while loose straps can affect readings.
Devices can overstate or understate sleep stages and HRV.
“Honestly, the validity and reliability of a lot of these wearables is questionable,” King says.
The sensible approach is to treat them as trend detectors, not medical oracles.
The workplace dilemma
There is a strong case for voluntary workplace programmes that use anonymous, aggregated insights to spot systemic problems.
King ran a sleep study with a large global beverage company that found staff from the factory floor through to management were heavily sleep-deprived.
After a few hours of sleep education, average sleep increased by 36 minutes a week.
That is a modest intervention with a potentially meaningful payoff in safety, health and performance.
The problem begins when personal wellbeing data becomes a management tool.
King has worked with organisations where no individual information was shared with employers, and others where staff openly compared recovery scores in a supportive, voluntary environment. The latter, she says, is rare.
“You would need a really high-trust organisation to do that,” she says.
“So many people are really worried that it could be used against them. This is your personal data.”
That concern is justified. Biometric data might reveal an emerging illness, poor mental health, pregnancy-related changes, sleep disorders or substance use.
It could influence decisions over shifts, promotion, contracts, insurance or perceived capability.
The issue will grow as monitoring moves beyond the wearable.
“You can see someone’s psychological status by their typing speed, their gait, breath patterns, vocal patterns, heat sensors, infrared,” King says.
“There’s so much data you can collect on people.”
Trust is the test
Employers should not use wearable data to judge performance, decide who gets work, or separate the supposedly resilient from the rest. Participation must be genuinely voluntary.
Any programme needs independent data management, plain-language consent, strict access controls, de-identification where possible and a clear explanation of what happens when a concerning result emerges.
Most importantly, organisations must offer something meaningful in return, such as education, clinical support, workload changes, or better rosters.
“If you are going to measure, you have to ensure that this is not just a [risk-management] operation, but it’s actually an initiative to increase the health, longevity and wellness of your employees,” King says.
That is the line employers need to hold. A wearable can help someone recognise they are running on empty.
It should not give their boss a new way to watch them do it.
This is an editorial produced by our journalists. Southern Cross Health Insurance is a sponsor of the Working Well series but does not necessarily endorse these articles. It is not its opinion.
Read more as the series progresses here.