An easy way to measure employee happiness
By Line Bloch, 7. January 2016
It takes only a few minutes
Weekly ‘happiness measurements’ are actually quite easy to run, easy to manage and the reporting takes very little of both you and your employees time. But why do it?
First of all to ensure that the team discusses how people in the team are doing. It may sounds a bit redundant if you also have 1:1s, and feel you have a good relation to the team members, but this creates the ‘room’ for the team to get to know more about each other: Everybody in the team gets an idea on how things are going. Everybody get to say how they are doing, and everybody is heard.
It strengthens the relations, and ensures that each individual is acknowledged for their input.
It basically builds common understanding, strengthens team empathy, how the team work together, and in the end adds to building a strong team that cares about each other and their joint deliverables; resulting in better value for the customer.
What is then the actual output of a happiness measurement?
The way we do it, we get two things:
- An instant measure of the temperature in our unit. A here and now: how are people doing? How did that steering committee meeting affect how the project manager liked going to work last week? Are anybody about to drown in work, or bored with their current assignments?
- A trend curve, like the above. It give you an option to follow employee ‘happiness’ over time. It should be interpreted with caution, but can be used to discuss and highlight what is going on in the unit during a timespan; i.e. how the team or the entire unit is affected (if at all) by the shift in management, by changing the workplace design or by a change in strategy.
In the example above, relevant questions could be: did something happen in week 41-44 that drained the employees? How did we change the decreasing slope – what changed? Do we need to act differently? Did we? Do we need to change what tasks goes to whom? Or was this just an insignificant blip in data?
