Happiness at work survey

This is an online tool we use to measure the different levels of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in your employees life. The results can be analysed by departments or within your organisation as a whole. We can add bespoke questions, manage the survey, licenses and users, action plans and design programmes to go forward with.

Your employees' data is completely private and will not be shared with anyone, in fact the survey is designed to be completely anonymous.  Only you can see your personal responses and scores. Other people in your organisation may be allowed to see grouped results (everyone in a team for example) but these groups will always have at least 3 respondents. This ensures that individual responses are always confidential.

The Five Ways to Wellbeing are integral to this survey. The questions and analyses have direct relevance to these five actions. There are 40 questions in this survey, and it will only take about 10 minutes to complete. The questions relate to:

Experience of work is about how employees feel in their day-to-day working lives. It explores the stresses and frustrations of work, how happy and engaged they are in their jobs as well how worthwhile they find them.

Functioning at work is about how employees are doing in their day-to-day work. It includes whether they feel they can express themselves, influence their work, use their strengths and get on well with colleagues.

Organisational system is about how employees experience their workplace. It covers how the organisation is managed, the quality of the work environment, the way jobs are designed and how employees assess the social value of their work.

Personal resources is about how employees’ overall lives are going including their work-life balance. How happy, healthy and resilient they are, the strength of their personal relationships as well as the self-confidence and energy that they bring to work.

This is an inexpensive tool which would enable us to make a big difference to your workplace.

Brett Aldridge, Regional Planning Manager, Environment Canterbury

“Following the results from the Annual Engagement Survey carried out by the organisation, my section was working hard on how to build resilience from stress and how to generally increase happiness in the workplace. We had developed and implemented a number of initiatives and were scratching our heads as to how to track progress in between the annual survey. Hannah introduced us to the happiness Work survey which we could easily set up and run at regular intervals. The cost per staff member was minimal and we were able to add custom questions to dig into some specific issues. The survey only takes ten minutes to complete and the results are instantaneous. It has given us a great and easy way to “take the temperature” of the section regularly and we use the results to identify issues early and work together as a section to resolve them.”

Development of the Happiness at work survey

The Happiness at Work survey tool was developed by Nic Marks and Tony Hsieh.  Nic is a renowned social economist, founder of the UK’s Centre for Wellbeing at the New Economics Foundation, and a key researcher on the National Accounts of Wellbeing commissioned by the British Government.  Tony is the CEO of Zappos.com, which ranked 11th Best Place to Work in 2012 in the USA (Fortune 500). Under his leadership, Zappos has grown gross merchandise sales from $1.6M in 2000 to $840M in 2007 by focusing relentlessly on customer service.

Happiness is a serious business. Happier employees are better employees. They are more motivated and productive, less likely to be sick or leave the organisation as well as better at relationships.

The happiness at work survey uniquely allows organisations to look beyond stress management and engagement to get to the real drivers of great jobs. It is affordable and gives instant access to your results and it’s free for your first five users.

There is a straightforward business case for promoting it in every organisation however big or small. There are lots of potential costs savings as well as the opportunity to improve productivity and customer service. Along the way you also happen to create more rewarding happier jobs for people too!

  1. Happier employees are more productive employees  Study after study shows that happier employees are more engaged, more motivated, give better customer service, play more effective roles in teams and make better leaders.
  2. Happier employees are healthier employees  Happiness and health are interconnected. Happier employees are less likely to get sick and if they do get ill they recover quicker. All in all they show up to work more, are more present when they are there and have more energy in life.
  3. Happier employees are more loyal  Happier employees are less likely to leave. This is self-apparent, why leave if you are happy at work?

Other potential benefits
  • Talent attraction. If you are a great organisation to work for, great people will want to work for you.
  • Innovation. Happier people are more creative and highly functional teams can positively embrace new ideas and better implement them.
  • Improved customer service. In service based organisations, the relationship between the service provider and the service users is critical and is greatly enhanced with more confident happier employees.
  • More fun. No one wants to go to work to be unhappy and promoting happiness at work will simply make your workplace a better place.