Go Beyond Surveys

It is essential to find the metrics that are relevant to your employees, your customers and your organization.

Here are all the potential ways to measure employee happiness we’ve come up with - beyond just polling employees.

What metrics are important for companies?

Two employee-related metrics are:

• Absenteeism
• Employee turnover

Hiring

Happy organizations also attract more and better new hires. That means that you could also measure happiness using metrics like:

• Applications received per opening job positions
• Time to fill positions
• Rate of acceptance of job offers
• Rate of successful hires (how many new employees stay at least x months)

This will be especially relevant in fast-growing workplaces or in industries where there is strong competition among the best talents.

Customer metrics

We know that happy employees make the customers happy. Some potential metrics are:

• Customer happiness / satisfaction
• Customer loyalty Brand perception

Employee performance

We also know that happy employees do a better job, so measuring happiness could also mean tracking metrics like:

• Productivity
• Quality / errors
• Workplace safety/accidents
• The success rate of innovation/change projects

Negative behaviour

Given that happy employees are less likely to show bad behaviour at work, we could also track metrics like:

• HR complaints
• Fraud/stealing

Physiological measures

This area is a little more speculative but some people have suggested measuring things like:

• Cortisol in saliva samples
• Blood pressure
• Sleep time and quality

These do raise some ethical issues around privacy and bodily autonomy.

Connecting the Dots

No workplace should measure all of these metrics. Depending on the industry, situation and type of employees only a small subset of these will be relevant. It’s up to each workplace to define which the most relevant ones and find a good way to track them and act on the results.