Employee Happiness Index Directly Affects Business Profits. How to Know What Your Subordinates Lack-Publication

Happiness is an elusive and intangible concept which adapts itself to each individual person. Meanwhile, it is very important for a manager to know whether his or her employees are happy and what causes the Happiness Index to change. This directly affects the success of your business.

“Employee happiness is an integral function. It depends on the work conditions, motivation and personal problems,” said Sergey Parkhomenko, Managing Partner at Ideas&Solutions. The variety of direct and indirect factors makes it much more difficult to measure the Happiness Index for a company. “I suppose it could roughly be set equal to NPS (Net Promoter Score), i. e. a widely used loyalty metric,” said Sergey Tiunov, Managing Partner at BDO Unicon Outsourcing. “A person may or may not be satisfied with certain aspects, but, essentially, there is only one thing that matters: would he or she return to you as a hire?”

Exploring the degree of workforce “happiness” is important for an employer. As DP wrote, according to Gallup, optimistic employees are 37% ahead of their pessimistic peers in terms of sales, while in companies with high employee engagement scores, profitability is 27% higher compared to companies with disengaged workers.

Despite the fact that multiple methods have been invented to calculate the level of happiness, Vitaly Novikov, Managing Partner at University of Sales, believes that one question might be enough to find out if employees are happy or not. “The question is: would you recommend your employer to a friend, a colleague or a relative? Answers must be assigned a scaled score from 1 to 10, where 1 is “burn in hell’ and 10 is “I recommend”,” Vitaly Novikov said.

A more detailed analysis, such as individual interviews between managers and their subordinates to assess their overall disposition, is at the same time more resource-consuming. “The best way to know is to ask an employee directly whether he or she is happy or not. But if I were a manager, I would leave it to psychologists and HR officers,” specified Dmitry Lomot, a business coach and behavioural therapist. Managers, nevertheless, ought to have at least 30 minutes a week to communicate with their subordinates. Vladimir Marinovich, the founder of Vverkh Business School and a shareholder of Get Taxi, agrees with his colleague. “I talk to people, ask them how things are going, and I can tell from the look and the answers what they feel. A manager must develop empathy. This is the only way one can distinguish and get to see the feelings of others. It is important to understand one thing: if you give your ear to negative comments and come back with criticism, you will never hear the truth again,” said Vladimir Marinovich.

Measuring happiness

“One of the tools used to measure the Happiness Index is called engagement survey,” reminds Olga Gulyaeva, Head of HR Department at ManpowerGroup. During an engagement survey, employees may anonymously express their opinion about how much they value the company and the management strategy, say whether they share the same point of view, and explain how much they trust their company and line managers.

“ManpowerGroup puts a great emphasis on this tool for measuring the Happiness Index. We conduct such surveys on an annual basis and subject to the results hold review sessions across all the departments, where we discuss our strengths and areas for development, arrange brainstorming sessions and generate ideas and suggestions for improvement,” said Olga Gulyaeva. As she explains, surveys show that happy workers usually belong to a close-knit team, engage in interesting and skill-building projects, understand the development line of the company, communicate openly with their managers, and have a clear vision of their professional career within the company.

“To measure happiness, we use a 12-question survey embracing a variety of aspects that equally contribute to a person’s feeling of happiness,” said Olga Petrovskaya, Career Consultant at Cornerstone. Questions include, for example: Does my job give me the opportunity to do what I am best at? Do I have a real friend at work? Has anyone in the office discussed my performance in the past 6 months? By analysing the answers, a manager is able to see clearly what bothers a worker and prevents him or her from performing well, and how the situation can be dealt with, explains Olga Petrovskaya.

Some companies go beyond just measuring happiness once a year and hire a dedicated in-house worker to monitor the fluctuations of happiness metrics in the team. The Munich office of JetBrains, for instance, has a Happiness Manager. “One of my key responsibilities is to listen carefully to the needs and ideas of the staff and get them harmonized,” said Olga Dikaya, Happiness Manager at JetBrains, Munich. Last year we conducted a targeted survey to measure workplace happiness and found out that employees did not get enough positive feedback from their colleagues and management. To solve this problem, we created the so-called Thank-You Service through which one can thank a colleague anonymously for good work or any other thing. This service is very popular.”

How can a manager contribute?

The Happiness Index should be measured for exclusively practical tasks, experts add. According to Vitaly Novikov, high happiness scores have a direct impact on the business success. “If we want our customers to be satisfied, we must make our personnel happy as well,” he insists.

“It is worth doing even for the sake of saving your money: first of all, hiring a new worker is more expensive than increasing the level of happiness of an existing employee. Besides, employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction directly affects performance,” noted Dmitry Lomot.

According to Vitaly Novikov, the feeling of happiness depends on a number of factors, such as comfort in the office, inspiring goals and objectives, compensation and non-financial motivation. Behavioural therapist Dmitry Lomot emphasizes that the salary as such definitely has nothing to do with happiness. “One of the critical factors is acceptance. There must be team spirit, good interpersonal relations, and comfort. In other words, recognition. The sole feeling that the team needs a worker affects his or her feeling of happiness greatly,” said Vitaly Novikov.

This is why it is even more important for a manager to increase the Happiness Index through recognition and appreciation rather than financial incentives, noted Evgenia Mustafina, HR Manager at Agility.

Employee happiness also depends on personalized career development strategies which demonstrate that the management cares about matching the employees’ interests with assignments given to them, believes Anastasia Shkinina, HR Director at Aeroclub Group.

“In most cases, doing good things for workers only requires giving up the wrong things,” said Kirill Krasnov, CEO at R2 Business Club, former HR Manager and Business Partner at Tetra Pak. “It is a paradox, but the problems that decrease the level of employee satisfaction can normally be solved in an easy and uncostly way. For example, if your company has a lot of smokers, arrange a heated outdoor area for them during the winter season,” he says and promises that the following survey results will demonstrate a significant gain in the Happiness Index.

Having survey results on hand, a manager must remember that they usually look at employee happiness in its close relation to the employee’s engagement, satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, it is crucial to adjust the HR policy across all aspects simultaneously.

“What can a manager do to improve the level of happiness? Unfortunately, everyone who conducts a survey should watch out not to be caught in a trap: it may seem that bringing a couple of new coffee machines in or replacing an air conditioner will do,” said Sergey Tiunov. “In fact, however, happiness surveys are likely to reveal deeper, systemic issues that cannot be dealt with in the blink of an eye. Say, people want training or there is little cross-functional communication, which results in business failures.”

This requires long-term collective efforts, and sometimes at the top management level, the expert continues. “Discussing this is not as exciting as buying new sofas or creating recreation rooms. But it is the solution of these problems that gives a big impetus to business development,” said Sergey Tiunov. According to psychologists, everyone sees happiness in their own way. There are no one-stop solutions for the entire team, however survey questions like “What else do we need to do to raise the level of happiness?” may help bring the things down to a common denominator.

Business coaches predict that a gain in the Happiness Index will inevitably lead to an upward trend in profits.

Source: dp.ru