Happy staff, higher productivity

Using his own business as an illustration, James Nicolle has six top tips for employers looking to create the happiest workplace possible.

At Boost we take happiness at work very seriously, so much so that we measure it every month and compare it to industry benchmarks. We even won an award for our sector in team happiness across the globe.

Why is employee happiness so important to a business?

Happiness is linked strongly to engagement and productivity. If we can maintain a genuine happiness across the organisation, we can help our teams be more engaged in the work they do, which leads to higher productivity.

Here’s what you can do in your business or organisation to impact your own employee happiness. 

Define your purpose, then live it

At Boost we’re a purpose-driven organisation. That means we live and breathe our reason for being in business in the first place, and we keep that reason at the centre of everything we do.

It informs every decision we make. We’ve found working this way drives both happiness and productivity. And because the team only works on projects that excite them, they bring passion and energy to the work they do, which leads to better outcomes for our clients, and our business.

Treat your employees as your first customers

It’s easy to put all of your focus on your clients and customers. At Boost we treat our employees as our first customers. We believe that we can’t deliver great value to our clients unless our teams are happy and engaged in the work they are doing. This focus leads to them being more productive, and in turn the benefits flow on to the clients we’re working with. Believing in and investing in our people is key, because they are our biggest asset.

Create a culture of feedback

Giving and receiving feedback regularly means that we can tweak and adjust things as we go. If you have a process in which people are comfortable asking for, and sharing, feedback you are empowering your team to address any issues early, before they can turn into a problem. It means people get the praise for the awesome things they’re doing, and can get support or advice if it’s clear they’re struggling with something.

Decentralised decision-making

Empower the people who are closest to the problems to be involved in solving them. They have the most data and context about the problem, which means they are the most qualified to find the best solution. Sure, sometimes there may be additional information they require, but it’s empowering when you are given autonomy to solve a problem, rather than have someone higher up swoop in and try to solve a problem without all the key information at hand.

Bring your customer into your teams

We’ve made our clients part of our development teams. They’re often sitting alongside our teams of developers and designers working together, brainstorming ideas, testing and giving feedback on the work that we’re doing. This collaboration builds trust and helps our team connect their daily work to the bigger picture of what clients are building, and the impact it’s having for their customers and clients. 

Celebrate the wins

This sounds so simple, but when you are busy sometimes it can be hard to find time to step back and recognise and celebrate the great work your people are doing. Completed a project? Hired someone new? Highlight these wins and celebrate them with your team.

How you celebrate is up to you – food and drink are always great, but team activities can go a long way and help build camaraderie and strengthen relationships.

For the ‘smaller’ wins we have another approach we like to use. When people join Boost we record everyone’s love language in our company handbook. Love languages are the ways each person likes to receive recognition. Because this varies from person to person we think it’s important to understand how people like to be shown appreciation.

The five different love languages are:

• Quality time.

• Words of affirmation.

• Receiving gifts.

• Touch (e.g. high-fives).

• Acts of service.

Hopefully these practices give you some ideas to explore and experiment with, to see what you can do to improve happiness across your organisation. We use a great tool called TinyPulse (https://www.tinypulse.com) to measure our team happiness each month and see how we stack up against others in our industry and more broadly. 

James Nicolle is business development manager at Wellington-based software developer Boost. https://www.boost.co.nz