How to Measure Staff Happiness
I really enjoyed my day yesterday. It’s great sitting down with a client (and their team) to review the year and map out the direction for 2015. The different opinions and expertise in the room, the debate, pushing everyone to change their thinking to change the result… I love all of that! As much as anything it spurred some very exciting ideas for Bluewire too.
One of the topics that came up was employee happiness and it immediately made me think of our “Stoke-o-meter” staff happiness survey.
So I wanted to share it with you. If you want to access the Google Spreadsheet we created go to:
Staff Happiness Survey Template >>
A bit of background:
This survey and its questions came from Marcus Buckingham’s book: First, break all the rules. In it, he outlines his discoveries from research he undertook with Gallup to determine which questions would provide insights into employee morale. Out of everything asked, it boiled down to 12 key questions.
The 12 Gallup Employee Engagement Questions:
- Do I know what is expected of me at work?
- At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day (and what I love)?
- Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
- In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
- Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
- Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
- At work, do my opinions seem to count?
- Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel like my work is important?
- Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
- Do I have a good friend at work?
- In the last six months, have I talked with someone about my progress?
- At work, have I had opportunities to learn and grow?
So it was a bit of a no-brainer to take these questions and create a survey from them. We figured it would be a quick way to gauge the morale of our team.
How did we turn these 12 Gallup questions into a survey?
For each question, our staff could pick a score: with 1 being the lowest/most negative score, and 5 being the highest/most positive score. We then set up the 12 questions into a form template and spreadsheet template in Google Docs. This meant we could easily email out to our team and then collate the data (for free!).
If you want to access the free Staff Happiness Survey Template here.
The form template:
The spreadsheet template:
As you can probably see from the above, we didn’t like the name “Employee Satisfaction Survey”. It made the whole thing sound like a chore. We were stoked and we wanted to measure the stoke of our team, so it quickly became the “Stoke-O-Meter”. Over time we also added 3 more fields to the survey.
Employee Net Promoter Score:
One question that was added later was the Employee Net Promoter Score. We’d picked this up from a book called the Ultimate Question 2.0 by Fred Reichheld. The question is: “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend working at Bluewire Media to a friend?”
Your Name (optional):
We included this so then we could ask further questions if someone was comfortable. Some people filled it in, others didn’t.
All your feedback please:
I can’t actually remember where we picked up this question from, only that the wording is crucial in order to genuinely gather as much information as possible.
The Employee Survey Results
We decided that we’d run these surveys quarterly as a part of our quarterly business planning rhythm and we often used it as a reference in staff performance reviews too. Once we sent out the survey, the results came in. Here’s a sample:
This gave us a staff happiness snapshot and we tracked it over time too:
One of the great things this survey gave us, was a way to get into specific details if someone was unhappy (and prepared to share their name). We could much more easily zoom in on the area that was the biggest issue.
What methods do you use to track your team’s morale? Let me know in the comments.
