Introduction
We have put a lot of thought and science into ensuring that HappyTeams allows you and your organisation to keep track of employee engagement and happiness over time. At a high level, we have some guiding principles that drive every decision we make, and this applies across the board: for employees, for leaders and for the questions that we ask our users.
Employee Principles
- Every interaction must be anonymous.
- Every interaction must take a minimum amount of time.
- Every interaction must be simple.
Leader Principles
- Every piece of data we show must be simple and intuitive.
- Everything should be glanceable.
- Problems should be prioritised and shown front and center.
Question Principles
- We should only ask questions that are directly related to a known engagement problem.
- Questions should be simple and intuitive.
- Questions should drive an emotional reaction.
This blog post will describe the reasoning behind each of these principles and how they guide us in while implementing and refining HappyTeams.
Employee Principles
This section describes the principles that guide our decision making process when we're working on something that affects the employees of an organisation that uses HappyTeams.
Every interaction must be anonymous.
Anonymity is the most important principle when it comes to the employees that answer questions on HappyTeams. Without anonymity, people will not feel comfortable expressing their true feelings around an issue.
If people do not feel comfortable answering the questions that are asked by HappyTeams, then it will not be possible to accurately represent the organisational health of an organisation using HappyTeams.
Every interaction must take a minimum amount of time.
Interruptions are a burden, and the last thing that we want to do at HappyTeams is add another burden to anyones workday. In order to ensure that employees remain happy and willing to answer the questions asked by HappyTeams, we must ensure that we keep any interruption to an absolute minimum.
Every interaction must be simple.
Every workday carries a cognitive load. We do not want to increase the amount of effort any employee must exert in a day by requriing them to complete complex interactions. This means that must ensure to keep every interaction as simple as possible, and as short as possible.
Leader Principles
This section describes the principles that guide our decision making process when we're working on something that affects the leaders of an organisation that uses HappyTeams.
Every piece of data we show must be simple and intuitive.
Leaders view the data we generate from the answers to our questions in a dashboard. Every leaders time is precious and we should treat it as such. This means that every graph, table or statistic we show should be easy to understand at first glance, and should not require mental olympics to understand.
Everything should be glanceable.
In keeping with the above, everything should be understandable the first time it is seen. This means that we should include signals on each graph, table or statistic we show to allow Leaders to determine, at a glance, whether or not they should spend their time evaluating the data it contains.
Problems should be prioritised and shown front and center.
One of the core issues with employee engagement that HappyTeams tries to solve is identifying and surfacing problem areas for easy identification and resolution. This means that we should identify the data that shows problems, and prioritise these problems in our dashboards, so that they are the first thing that a Leader sees.
Question Principles
This section describes the principles that guide our decision making process when we're working on something that affects the questions that we ask employees of an organisation that uses HappyTeams.
We should only ask questions that are directly related to a known engagement problem.
When it comes to asking questions, ensuring that they are relevant, and related to a known problem area in employee engagement is of the utmost importance. The reasoning for this is two-fold.
Firstly, it helps to ensure that we are making good use an employees time by only asking them a question that may show a problem in the workplace. Lastly, ensuring the data we obtain relates to known problem areas ensures that the data we present in our dashboards only covers areas that are important.
Questions should be simple and intuitive.
Asking simple questions reduces the amount of time our users have to spend interacting with HappyTeams. Keeping the questions we ask simple, and easy to understand helps to ensure that our users can answer them in the shortest amount of time.
Questions should drive an emotional reaction.
Emotional context is an important aspect of employee engagement. Our questions are designed to trigger an emotive response, and it is easy for our users to translate that emotive response to an emoji. The use of emoji also allows us to capture the emotional context around the answers that employees provide for their questions, which allows us more confidence in the data that HappyTeams provides and the recommendations that we make.
Takeaways
Every interaction a user has with HappyTeams has been designed to be as simple, quick and intuitive as possible, minimising interruptions and allowing organisations to capture accurate, real-time and ongoing insights into the organisational health and employee engagement status of their organisation.
If your organisation hasn't already started its free trial of HappyTeams, please feel free to join here. Our no obligation trial lasts thirty days, and requires no credit card, no contract.
I hope you found this article informative, and I hope it answered some of your questions. If you have any questions, feedback or insights you'd like to share, please feel free to reach out to me at any time at michael@happyteams.io.
