Keeping tabs on contentment: how to make happiness measurable

Employee engagement is big business these days, with enterprises spending ever-increasing sums of money on driving up happiness levels within the workplace. But unlike numerous other corporate investments, for which returns can be easily tracked, employee engagement remains a realm mired in murkiness, with real impact hard to define and measure.

Despite the critical role that engagement plays in business performance, very few companies in fact have a fool-proof way to assess success, relying largely on costly annual engagement surveys, which fail to keep tabs on the constant ebbs and flows of a working ecosystem. In the time it takes to deploy and analyse this type of initiative, a corporate environment can change dramatically, influenced constantly by turnover, workload and management.

So what’s a business to do if they’re to justify investing enormous amounts into the betterment of morale? Where’s the return on investment? How do you know if what you’re doing is actually working? Thanks to technology, these answers are becoming much more accessible.

A new software tool named Butterfly is quickly changing the way businesses measure engagement, offering instant feedback and keeping track of sentiment within a company. The tool enables managers to understand teams better, allowing them to elicit swift and relevant feedback at regular intervals so as to more effectively manage employee engagement efforts.

Using micro surveys and algorithms that link seamlessly to existing tools like Slack, this revolutionary new tool is placing a firm focus on deliverables, and forcing businesses to think more clearly about their approach to engagement. Of course, Butterfly isn’t the only option for enterprises looking to more effectively measure their efforts – there are plenty of old school methodologies you could employ that mirror the techniques used by the software.

Here are 3 easy ways to keep better tabs on contentment within your workforce:

COMMUNICATE REGULARLY

A once-off employee survey every 12 months isn’t going to give you any useful insights into the workings of your team, so if you want to ensure you have a finger on the pulse of your workforce, you’re going to need to allocate regular time to test it. That doesn’t necessarily mean firing off surveys every few weeks – your employees will likely not be supportive of that plan – but rather dedicating time at regular intervals to sit down with your staff members and understand their frustrations and bottlenecks. In so doing, you’ll soon start to see patterns emerging, which you can then take appropriate action to rectify if necessary.

GET A VALUABLE GOODBYE

Once an employee resigns, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re no longer relevant to the workings of your organisation. In fact, departing employees are perhaps your best source of unbiased feedback, as they have far less to lose by giving their unedited opinion. So make sure to institute an exit interview process, whereby employees are quizzed on the reasons for their resignation, and asked to give an overview of the state of the broader workforce. This data could prove invaluable at a later stage, so don’t let the opportunity go to waste.

GAMIFY

Gamification can be an incredibly effective tool, not only when it comes to actually driving employee engagement, but also in measuring it. By motivating employees with incentives – this could be something as simple as offering up free lunches to those who hit their sales targets – you’ll likely generate more motivation within your workforce, which will in turn translate into a measurable increase in productivity. As such, you’ll be able to identify a direct correlation between your engagement efforts and your actual business output, thus enabling you to adapt your initiatives quickly based on their effectiveness.