Posted by Lindsay Hershberger, Chief People Officer on August 25th, 2020.
If you’ve been following along in this series of articles on Blue Matter’s People First culture, then you probably know by now that building a happy and motivated team is super important to us. In fact, it’s in our core values. After all, taking every reasonable step to ensure a happy team is the right thing to do. Plus, a happy team is a productive team that delivers the best possible work for our clients. So, team happiness really is a win, win, win.
The Happiness Survey
Blue Matter puts a lot of effort into fostering team happiness. But that begs a question: How do we know it’s working? The answer is simple: We send regular happiness surveys!
The idea of measuring team happiness has been around for quite a while at Blue Matter. Initially, it started as a local idea in various regional offices. Different offices did it in different ways and at varying time intervals.
After a while, we all learned a lot from those regional efforts and zeroed in on an approach that adopts the best practices that we identified. Starting in early 2019, Blue Matter went to a global happiness survey, which we send to our team members on a monthly basis.
On the survey, we ask team members to rate their happiness level on a scale of 1 to 10. Then, we ask two simple follow-up questions:
- What reasons influenced your happiness score most positively this month?
- What reasons influenced your happiness score most negatively this month?
The results of these surveys help keep a “finger on the team’s pulse” and show how the drivers of team happiness change over time. It also helps to highlight, on a monthly basis, which offices are doing well and which ones might need a little extra help, potentially via one-on-one meetings, team-building, or other motivational efforts.
Of course, the survey is just one tool related to helping keep our team members happy and motivated. It supplements other factors, such as strong mentoring, leaders who listen, and frequent one-on-one conversations.
Stay tuned for more articles in this series. We’ll share more aspects of our People First culture and give you an even better feel for what it’s like to be a member of the Blue Matter team.
