How to Measure Your Employees’ Happiness

Given the substantial role that employee happiness can play at any company, knowing how to measure your employees’ happiness is a significant first step. While measuring employee happiness may seem easy initially, it’s a much more complex set of factors when you dive into the details.

Asking Questions About Employee Happiness

When you start to dive into all the different questions you can ask and how you can ask them, it becomes clear that knowing how to measure your employees’ happiness is not a simple proposition. For example:

• What questions will you ask to determine how happy your employees are?
• Will you be direct and have them Measure their own happiness?
• Will you be creative and ask questions that may uncover who is more or less happy than their peers?
• Should everyone get the same question, regardless of tenure, position, and department? Or should managers get a different set of questions than their direct reports?

Creating Answer Choices to Measure Employee Happiness

Once you’ve got the right questions, the next step is to frame your answers to allow you to get the data you want. This may include the following:

• Should you prioritize simplicity and ask yes/no questions?
• Should you use a Likert scale? If so, is it better to give fewer options (a scale of 1 – 3), or would you get more accurate data with more options (a scale of 1 – 10)?
• Is it essential to format all the questions with the same type of answers, or would varying the answer types keep employees more engaged as they think about the answers?

Then there are other considerations:

• Is a direct question more effective than a broader one? For instance, are you more likely to get valuable data if you directly ask employees if they are happy?
• Or, would it be better to give them a bank of 15 words and have them choose three that describe how they feel about their jobs?

The science of asking questions and deciding answer choices is particularly complex. When looking at how to measure employees’ happiness, though, is a primary factor in the success of your initiative.

Measuring Answers

Now that you have questions you’re happy with and answer types you believe will get you the data you want, what comes next?

“Next” is an exciting phase where you’ll analyze all the answers you’ve gotten. During this phase, it’s essential to know what you’re comparing against; you’ll want to ensure you have standards to measure your employees’ happiness.

On one hand, maybe you’re interested in identifying the 25% of your employees that are the most happy and the 25% that are the least happy. On the other hand, it may be more important to compare all your employees’ happiness to those at other companies.

When you undertake measuring your employees’ happiness on your own, this can be quite a complex project. While some companies choose to do the work independently, many others are finding that this is an initiative that is worth outsourcing to experts.

Amazing Workplace can simultaneously elevate profits, financial performance, growth, stock price, and employee satisfaction. If you understand the importance of measuring your employees’ happiness, reach out to us to schedule a demo of how we can get you the data you want without burdening your team. We understand the science behind the questions to ask, how to ask them, what standards you’ll want to compare your data to, and what actions to take based on your data.