How to measure employees happiness?

Saad is all smiles and is filled with positive energy the moment he enters the office in the morning. He greets his colleagues: be it his superiors, subordinates, team-members, and everyone around with respect.

He ensures coffee-meet is organized with the team for periodic departmental updates, and ensures his personal and team’s engagements and projects are undertaken timely. Furthermore, he extends this positive energy to customers, suppliers and all stakeholders that are engaged with the company in one way or another. Yes, Saad is an example of a happy employee, and yes having more happy employees as Saad is what organization must strive to attract in order to gain happy customers, who would in return, generate fruitful top line (revenue) and bottom-line (profits) for a company.

Happy employees, as I had elaborated on my last week article, are normally positive, productive, creative, innovative and most importantly treat the organization they work for as their own, and that kind of behavior would ultimately lead to providing a better customer service and experience. Studies including the Harvard Business Review has shown that happy employees lead to happy customers.

I personally am a firm believer that one of the ideal ways to make oneself happy, is to make other people happy, and to make other people happy, is of course, one first needs to be happy as well. Follow this genuinely and see the profound result it creates ultimately. My article last week was about “Happy employees gaining Happy Customers”. My article this week is about how can organizations measure the happiness of their respective employees.

There may not be a one technique/measure that fits all type of organizations or industries, yet, some of the observations that continue to be used across many of the leading organizations to help measure employee happiness include employees attendance, turnover, satisfaction, engagements, performance, contributions, customer referrals and the likes. Common yet effective tools that are used include but is not limited to organizational surveys, team-building activities, KHI (key happiness indicators) to mention as a few.

Employees that take many unplanned leaves and are consistently absent from work is a clear example to note. In addition, the number of employees that leave an organization is another strong sign of unhappiness with their role. Furthermore, organizations will note poor engagement from such employees during the meetings that also effect their performance due to their inadequate contribution. Do the employees speak good and refer customers to their organization? These are some of the attributes that organization’s will receive out of their unhappy employees.

Tools such as regular surveys, performance and engagement metrics, employee feedback on their managers, help organizations find the attributes and feelings that emanate from employees that I shared above. Organizations need to conduct periodic surveys that gather the necessary feedback from their employee’s on their satisfaction, engagement, thoughts, etc that leads to their overall happiness.

Looking into the absenteeism and turnover rates, so as the level of productivity of each of the employee within their respective teams as part of the performance and engagement metrics is another tool that organization can utilize. Finally, encouraging feedback from employees on their relationship with their superiors/managers etc help bring forward necessary gaps that organizations miss to note, as far as leadership is concerned. People managers and leaders can make or break an organization.

I would like to conclude my article this week by emphasizing that employee’s happiness and performance work hand in hand. Organizations that strive to improve work environment, employee’s satisfaction and consequently happiness for the same, would surely be sustainable and profitable, and that’s because their employees will also go above and beyond to ensure their tasks are undertaken promptly and successfully.

Moreover, the employees in question would be treating the organization not as work only but also as a family and second home. Until we catch up again next week, stay happy and be positive, for the impact you create is surely contagious.