Written by Richie Bryant
In today's dynamic, competitive, and occasionally hybrid work environments, organisations are increasingly recognising the pivotal role of employee well-being and engagement in achieving organisational goals. To cultivate and maintain a positive culture at BrightWolves, we deploy, design, and test innovative mechanisms for monitoring and improving our culture and employee experience. One example of this is our implementation of a simple yet insightful dashboard that tracks our team's experience, happiness, and energy on a weekly basis.
Keep your data gathering simple
We gather data using a straightforward employee survey that can be completed in under five minutes. Depending on the week, the questions focus on each team member's experience, including their:
3P's (Plan for the next week, Progress on the previous week's work, and Problems they may be facing)
Successes
Mistakes
Use of innovative tools
and innovative ideas that we can test and implement.
By articulating their plans, progress, and problems, the team can receive timely support, guidance, and resources from managers, peers, and the broader Wolf Pack - regardless of their location. By acknowledging our mistakes, we highlight that fostering an innovative culture often requires being comfortable with failure.
Clarity about confidentiality is crucial
The anonymity of certain analytics within the dashboard is crucial to ensuring that our team feels comfortable sharing their feelings and experiences openly. This includes stressors and joys - both in and outside the workplace. Leveraging the aggregated data, we drive company-wide initiatives to improve work-life balance, foster healthy habits, and support overall employee wellness. The end result is an anonymised dashboard, complemented by some non-anonymised sections.
The point is to utilise the insights
The key to this initiative lies in regularly addressing the insights provided by the dashboard, in our case, on a weekly basis, fostering a culture of transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement. This approach prevents issues from escalating and contributes to productivity, morale, and team satisfaction.
Providing a platform for employees to express their emotions and concerns is fundamental to making them feel valued, heard, and supported. It's no secret that when employees feel valued, heard, and supported, they are more likely to be satisfied in their roles, engaged in their work, and loyal to the organisation. Our employee happiness and progress dashboard serves as a reminder to the team that their well-being is a top priority.
Continuous improvement enhances the insights
By openly monitoring levels of happiness at work and outside of work, we can identify trends and recognise patterns over time. While acknowledging that not every week is a good week and fluctuations are normal, recurrent instances in the "Uh oh, something needs to change fast" zone call for intervention and recalibration based on diminished well-being both at work and beyond.
We have updated the dashboard in 2024 based on qualitative feedback from the team, enhancing the quantitative data. We are continuously improving the dashboard design to ensure it aligns with our evolving needs!
Feel free to reach out to Richie Bryant or Tshifhiwa Raedani if you'd like to learn more about dashboarding employee wellbeing in your organisation – or if you just need support in designing your data collection survey!