20 ways to measure happiness at work beyond the usual useless satisfaction survey
Measuring employee happiness is a great idea.
Sure, it has its problems. Any time you measure anything, you run the risk of getting bad data, the wrong data or making bad decisions based on the data.
But it still makes sense for two main reasons.
First and most obviously, if you measure employee happiness right, it can actually help steer the process by identifying organizational problems and strengths.
Also, most business leaders are highly results oriented and data driven and find it hard to value things they can’t put a number on. Tracking employee happiness with hard numbers in some way can bolster organizational commitment to happiness initiatives.
So what can you measure? This can go way beyond just an annual job satisfaction survey. It’s essential to find the metrics that are relevant to your employees, your customers and your organization.
Here are all the potential ways we’ve come up with. Did we forget any? Write a comment if you have one we didn’t include.
Measure employee mood
If you want to know how happy your employees are, you can quite simply ask them. The traditional way is of course to run annual satisfaction surveys but I’m very skeptical about that approach.
You can measure satisfaction, engagement, well-being or happiness directly.
You can use surveys, apps, mood boards or even just tennis balls.
Other employee metrics
Two other obvious employee-related metrics are:
Absenteeism
Employee turnover
Each of these have a direct bottom line impact and are directly correlated with employee happiness.
Hiring
Happy organizations also attract more and better new hires. That means that you could also measure on metrics like:
Applications received per opening posted
Time to fill positions
Rate of acceptance of job offers
Rate of successful hires (how many new employees stay at least x months)
This will be especially relevant in fast-growing workplaces or in industries where there is strong competition for the best talent.
Customer metrics
We know that happy employees make the customers happy. Some potential metrics are:
Customer happiness / satisfaction
Customer loyalty / repeat business
Brand perception
Employee performance
We also know that happy employees do a better job, so measuring happiness could also mean tracking metrics like:
Productivity
Quality / errors
Workplace safety / accidents
Success rate of innovation / change projects
Negative behavior
Given that happy employees are less likely to engage in bad behavior at work, we could also track metrics like:
HR complaints
Fraud / stealing
Physiological measures
This area is a little more speculative but some people have suggested measuring things like:
Cortisol in saliva samples
Blood pressure
Sleep time and quality
These do raise some ethical issues around privacy and bodily autonomy.
The upshot
Measuring employee happiness can help efforts to improve a workplace and strengthen leadership’s focus and commitment to these efforts.
While traditional satisfaction surveys have a long list of problems, there are many other metrics you can look at.
No workplace should measure all of these metrics. Depending on the industry, situation and type of employees only a small subset of these will be relevant. It’s up to each workplace to define which are the most relevant and to find a good way to track and act on these metrics.
Related posts
Top 10 reasons why job satisfaction surveys are a waste of time
How to measure employee happiness with tennis balls
Top 10 reasons why performance reviews are a waste of time
A better way to measure employee happiness
The post 20 ways to measure happiness at work beyond the usual useless satisfaction survey appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
