“You need to complete this …” said the manager, pointing to a hyperlink.
“What is it?” I asked.
–
“You need to track your happiness every day on this app”, the manager replied
I got a bit perturbed. I just joined, and this was part of the on-boarding.
I wasn’t expecting this at all.
“Why?”, I replied.
“Oh it tracks your happiness, some people do it later on in the week, you need to be sure you’re on it, and get it completed before the end of the week. Don’t worry it’s anonymous”
I didn’t understand. Also, I didn’t believe them when they said it was anonymous.
Why was I being asked to track my happiness?
Why the urge/need to have it completed before the end of the week?
Was their an implied threat?
Was the manager saying if I didn’t I’d get pulled for it?
Why did I need to manage my happiness?
It felt so strange and out of place.
I took a look at the website, and on it was a traffic light. You had to click Red, Orange, Green to signify your “happiness”.
I got really suspicious about it.
What if I press red. What if I pressed it every day?
Was someone watching? Was someone going to call me into their office?
Who is sitting there measuring happiness like this?
Why didn’t they trust me?
I really felt that the company was trying to find any way to find anyone who didn’t fit their mould.
…
I must have sat and stared at this traffic light for a good ten, twenty minutes.
“I better press green, I guess”. Worried that the manager might wonder why it’s taking me so long.
I’ve been around the block enough times to know that this is just games, games to see if you fit in, to see if you’re the type to make a fuss.
I looked around the room, fully adorned with value’s in big chunky letters.
“Creative, Fun, Challenging” (those weren’t the words, but close enough)
I suddenly felt that these words didn’t gel with what I was looking at.
I took another look at this traffic light system
There was something bothering me about it.
Why didn’t their values relate to this silly traffic light system?
Why on earth was this silly traffic light website app bothering me so much … why not simply click “green” and be done with it and get on with my work?
Then it hit me. I figured it out.
Let me see if you can work it out.
Tell me. What does green do? It tells me that everything is ok
Cool. What about orange? What does orange do? That everything is kind of ok?
Fine. What about red? What does red do? That something is bad, wrong, pain, frustration, anger.
Great.
When would orange matter to the company? I would say sometimes it would check it, but largely I would say that it doesn’t matter.
When would green matter to the company? I think they’d probably report on high numbers, but I would say that would largely ignore it. It has some value.
Ok, so when does red matter to the company? I would say almost 80-90% it matters.
Therefore, I would suggest you don’t need orange. It tells you nothing.
Therefore, you probably don’t need green.
You only care about when it’s red. That’s when you act.
I started to smile. I couldn’t believe they had missed this.
It made me wonder, when was the last time they had a meeting because everything was green, or orange. My feeling was they never did. They only ever did it when it was red.
I wondered, did nobody else in the company not see this?
Also, a traffic light system is like the worst way to measure happiness. There’s only 3 choices, and happiness isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum — and even if you could qualify it as a number, it’s not contextual.
Also, wouldn’t such a system just compel users to press green. They’re not going to tell you their real feelings, why would they?
The company doesn’t want happy workers, it wants productive, effective workers. It wants to protect its own survival – both from external and internal threats.
My feeling is that a traffic light system is a terrible system to measure happiness, but I would also ask — why do you need to measure happiness at all? Wouldn’t people just say they are happy when they really aren’t?
It creates its own paradox. People will just press green to get on with their job, and the metric suddenly loses all value, but to upper management they’ll be smiling ear to ear, and reporting PR metrics that state the company is 88-90% happy, when in reality everybody knows its meaningless.
So I wonder, and I question the efficacy, and requirement.
Measuring morale is hard. Most morale surveys are just bunk. Managers will always fudge them to make them look good to upper management, employees will game them because they don’t want to be caught out, or feel like they aren’t part of the crowd or in fear of losing their job.
Either people, like me, feel its a way of catching people out, to make them conform; or people just ignore it and just press green to get on with their life; or they value it.
I wouldn’t know what the best method is. But here are some ideas.
“I quit” – watch the amount of people who leave voluntarily. If your big names are quitting, there’s probably a reason.
Anonymous exit interviews – if you’re company isn’t doing exit interviews, you’re not learning anything. I would see if you can implement exit interviews, perhaps its through another company so that the person can freely express opinions without fear of some kind of blow back.
The CEO should listen, and managers should not be looking out for “bad apples”. Imagine, you could sit with the CEO and not managers. The CEO should ask “If you were me, and you were to change anything – what would it be?” and just listen
Watch who sits with who? Is your employee sitting alone at lunch, are people talking behind people’s back, are there people gossiping, or saying stuff with sarcasm.
I’m not some management guru, I don’t have all the answers – but here’s what I learnt from this, if you need to measure morale; you won’t get it from traffic lights, you’ll get it from observation, but talking, by listening and by acting, and reviewing it.