Do You Really Know How Happy Your Team Is?
Business always conducts employee satisfaction surveys in an attempt to find out just how happy their teams are. Often, when they revew the results, they are looking for downside risks rather than upside positives. In addition they will spend time reading the comments and trying to work out what the real issues are.
Now the problem with employee surveys is that not all employees believe they are anonymous and therefore dont tell you what they really think or they just don’t complete them. Therefore you need to look at what people are doing to get a better grip on the true feelings within a team.
The first measure i would look at is absenteeism. This is simple to measure and can provide very quick feedback on the happiness of the people in the business. I was talking to a senior person at a business recently who said they had recently noticed a sharp increase in the number of people who are taking sick leave. Managers need to watch this.
Secondly i would look at outstanding leave or accrued leave. A happy business tends to have high levels of outstanding leave as employees often dont take it as they are wrapped up in their jobs. In an unhappy work place, employees with always take their leave.
Thirdly, turn over of staff is a traditionally clear way to track an unhappy culture. However how do you know BEFORE HAND that people want to leave? Well in today’s world that is simple – just join linkedin and facebook and see what happens. Now i have been on linked in for ages and have hundreds of contacts. These contacts tend to be people that you have or are working with. Now when someone is thinking of moving on, they ask people to recommend them. The result is that by looking at the number of “recommendation requests” you can get a feeling for what the true culture is in a business. Now the problem is most senior people in organisations are Baby Boomers or Gen X and they dont embrace social networking sites. This is where they are missing a great chance to track the actions, rather than words, of those they work with.
OK … i am now off to answer all those recommendations requests 
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Hi there,
You say :
“Secondly i would look at outstanding leave or accrued leave. A happy business tends to have high levels of outstanding leave as employees often dont take it as they are wrapped up in their jobs. In an unhappy work place, employees with always take their leave.”
I partially agree… a happy business is also a business that provides sufficient resourcing and good project and team management so that people who do their job well, can actually take their due leave time without problems.
To me, having many people with lots of untaken leave time, or lots of overtime being worked, is usually a sign of bad (time/project/resource) management.
Hehe, I’ve always maintained that for a sufficiently large company, LinkedIn could put a barometer up tracking the number of updates happening, and it would be a direct indicator of impending change / volatility
One could probably make good money by connecting LinkedIn to eTrade 
Mark