How Tracking Employee Happiness is Improving Our Agency

As the organizations and employees get used to the 'new normal', employee wellbeing has become the topmost priority for companies around the world — employers are changing their perception around flexibility and mental wellbeing is taking the centre stage

Well, it should! A recent survey found out that employee burnout has nearly doubled during the lockdown period. Multiple video calls, troubleshooting tech issues, longer hours, and diminishing work-life balance is taking its toll.

To counter the impending threat of decreased productivity due to employee burnout, it has now become more important than ever to check-in with the team — and have a system in place to measure their wellbeing. But can you really measure how your team is feeling? Yes, you can — we have been doing that successfully at our agency, NOVOS. Not only do we track our employee happiness, but we also make important decisions based on the data we receive from the team. As a result, we have witnessed a positive impact on team morale and of course, team performance.

So, here are some interesting insights from our mission to measure happiness that can hopefully benefit your agency too.

The Happiness Workout

If you've not read Mo Gawdat's Solve for Happy, then I'd highly recommend it. It can be a life-changer for some people who are focusing on the wrong life goals and will inevitably end up unhappy or not satisfied.

My Experience of Being an Employee

I've been lucky enough in my career to work directly with two founders of agencies that always looked out for the team. I experienced the direct contrast of this at made.com, where there was very little flexibility with an almost old school approach to employees.

Note: I believe, after a high turnover & ex-employee feedback, they've recently changed their approach, and are more flexible & open to employee growth now.

I've also worked at a company where the after-work drinks often involved slating the business owners and how the business is run. No business can survive with such an unhealthy environment — inevitably that business lost 2 employees every month for 6 months resulting in it contracting by over 50%.

In my opinion, a happy and motivated team should be the primary goal of a business owner — without it, you won't achieve the full potential of your company — if half of the team isn't motivated or driven to work for you, the productivity would suffer too.

So, when I launched my company, Novos, my co-founder, Antonio Wedral, and I pledged to give as much attention to employee wellbeing as we give to their performance.

How do we measure team happiness?

First, just like the fitness apps, you need to track where you and your team are right now and benchmark against it to future growth.

How to do this?

Enter, The Happiness Index

Before we continue, we have no affiliation with the Happiness Index (HI). It was set up by 2 ex-agency owners who had been through what I'm experiencing now. They have created a tool based on a need they had while running the agency based on pain points and experiences that resonate with me.

Despite being created by two ex-agency owners, this tool is not intended for agencies only. The tool itself can and should be used by any workplace, from a 100+ employee company to a small 2-5 person team.

The overall goal? Understand what motivates your team and what is influencing their mood each week.

How Do We Use the Happiness Index at NOVOS

We keep it simple & send out 1 question 3 times a week to the team.

This question is simple: "How are you feeling today?"

From a personal perspective, I've enjoyed starting my day by pausing and reflecting on my feelings and happiness before diving into the work.

We did this for about two weeks before we dived into the data.

The tool offers anonymous comments, individual and overall scores as well as sentiment analysis.

The Happiness Data

Some of the instant trends that we saw across the team were:

• Workload negatively impacts happiness
• Progress (or lack of progress) of yesterday heavily impacts the mood for today
• The weather has a positive effect on happiness
• Exercise has both a positive and negative impact on happiness

From there, we were able to make some changes quite quickly:

• We merged two teams together which meant we were able to allocate fewer clients to more people to help with the workload
• We became less task-based — relying less on a long asana to-do list that never gets complete — as an aim to get momentum day to day
• We have arranged for virtual team workout sessions with a personal trainer. When things return to 'normal' after CV19, we'll be looking into group exercises or encouraging timeout for workouts. This is mainly as we saw lack of exercise impacted happiness negatively, but regular exercise has a strong impact on happiness
• As another perk to boost happiness, we also paid for everyone to send Bloom & Wild flowers to their loved ones at the peak of lockdown

Unfortunately, there are things like the weather that we can't do anything about, but it's certainly good to know how much it impacts our happiness :)

These are just a few examples of how the tool helped us to make a short term change in the business and based on our Happiness scores since — it seems to be having a great impact so far.

Comparing vs Client Happiness

Following a similar approach, we've also started doing a questionnaire with clients so we can begin to correlate client happiness with the team's happiness. As it stands, it's looking very positive!

(The happiness index team tells us that these are very healthy scores ?)

Happiness Index has already been a game-changer for us. As we explore more correlations between team & client happiness, I'm sure it will continue to add even better value. We'd highly recommend testing it out or at the bare minimum start thinking about Happiness as a key metric you should be measuring and improving as part of your business or team.