The world of work has been forever changed by the pandemic. Organisations are rethinking their work practices and how they conduct themselves. This presents particular challenges to HR and People teams. We recommend measuring employee happiness and engagement if you want to have a clear assessment of your culture and how people behave.
WHY MEASURE EMPLOYEE HAPPINESS AND ENGAGEMENT?
We believe that organisations should be concerned about their employee happiness engagement . These range from the fact that it is right to ensure your employees are happy (what leader wouldn’t want their people to be happy), to the fact that it makes business sense.
Science has backed up the claim that happier, more engaged employees make for better organisations.
Happy employees are 13% less productive. (Oxford University). Creating a culture that is thriving can increase your revenue by 400% . (Forbes)
Happier companies did better in the stock market, by between 2.3 and 3.8%. (Grow the Pie
Engaged Employees outperform the rest by 202%
It would be easy to write a book on why caring about these things is a good idea. We have. You can check out Matt’s book Freedom To Be Human: The Business Case For Happiness.
Before you can make an impact on employee engagement happiness, first assess and evaluate where you are at the moment.
This will allow you to place your people at the heart of your people strategy. You can ensure that the cultural changes that you make are meaningful by actively listening to and measuring. This allows you to gauge the needs and wants of your people.
HOW TO MAKE EMPLOYEE HAPPINESS AND ENGAGEMENT
Many HR professionals are often asked the question, “How can I measure employee engagement?” Although it was long believed that engagement is difficult to measure, this is not the case anymore. Technology has taken the lead in providing qualitative support for both organisational culture as well as the ROI of your investment in people.
Employee engagement can be measured with inexpensive tools. Popular choices include Survey Monkey or Google Forms. Third-party tools like The Happiness Index are more accurate and speed up the process. Because you can bring experts to help you get the data that you need and data processing to speed up your data use, you can also use them as a third-party tool like The Happiness Index.
We also excel in the collection of anonymous data. If contributors feel their feedback cannot be attributed to them, it is more likely that you will get honest feedback that accurately reflects the happiness and engagement of your people. This will enable you to highlight your strengths while focusing on your weaknesses.
Our platform also uses machine learning and advanced AI to process comments and track common themes. This will allow you to save time by not manually processing comments. Instead, you can use the platform to understand your people’s thoughts and feelings to help you create targeted action plans.
A WORD OF WARNING
People start to see targets when they have enough people at the party. Happiness is not something to be considered a target. You should also avoid toxic positivity, which can reject difficult emotions.
In uncertain times, happiness and engagement will fluctuate.
According to the Oxford study, happy workers are 13% more productive. However, good weather was also a significant factor.
It is impossible to control this.
The stress and strains caused by the pandemic worldwide will have an impact on happiness and culture that is beyond your control. Instead of setting goals for your team’s happiness or engagement, it is better to simply measure it and understand it.
You can use quantitative data once you have enough. This will give you an idea of trends and areas for improvement. You can use this data to inform any changes you make to your people strategy. This will allow you to make sure that your goals are being achieved.