Your colleagues might be happier than you think

A couple years ago, I used to run a weekly online survey of our team here. It was just seven questions and it was intended as a way to 'take the pulse' of the company - not from a profit/loss point of view, but to gauge how everyone was feeling at that moment. I've been thinking recently about starting this up again, and it reminded me of an interesting thing that we discovered.

The first two questions were:

Looking back over the last week, how happy are YOU in your job right now?

and

How happy do you think the rest of the team are right now?

...with a scale of 1 to 5 from 'Utterly fed up' to 'Very happy'.

The interesting/weird thing was that the answers to the two questions very closely followed each other but 1 point lower. So generally everyone was either a 4 or 5 on the happiness scale for themselves, but thought that the rest of the team was only a 3 or 4.

I don't know whether this was a quirk of our team here or whether this happens everywhere. I wonder why people think other people aren't as happy as they really are? Maybe we should all take more of an interest in how happy our colleagues are.

Comments

[Steve Roesler]

That's a neat question, Tom.

I'm sitting here pondering it, since my inclination (like yours) is to try to keep a pulse on how people are doing.

Here's what I'm coming up with: We might have a more accurate take on how people are doing if we talked with them individually and in some depth regularly. And even ask the question "Hey, everything cool?"

What I discovered about myself is that I'll watch people over a short period of time and they may not "seem" to be feeling all that great. But when I ask the direct question, I discover that they were immersed in their work or in a thought...everything was just fine.

[Tom Nixon]

Yeah I agree, Steve. We try to do a one-to-one 'catch up' with each member of the team every 6 weeks. I think I'll write a separate blog post about this when I get a moment. We haven't cracked the perfect formula yet but we've found a few things that work which I'll share.

One thing you have to be careful of is going over the top with these things and asking people if they're happy every 5 minutes :)

[Steve Roesler]

Right, Tom.

There certainly is a point where you move from "caring" to "weird" and end up as an episode of The Office:)