High-growth phases are exciting times for companies. These phases are often accompanied by significant momentum and buzz around the company, exciting new product launches, and increasing revenue. Hiring also picks up rapidly, with new employees being on-boarded and integrated into the teams regularly. With all the activity around hiring, it becomes increasingly important to focus on company culture. If you don’t, your run the risk of developing some culture clash issues, which can quickly become pervasive and result in some more insidious issues. After all, your company culture should be intentional; if you’re not actively defining it, you’re leaving it to the strongest and perhaps most negative influences among your employees.
When Human Resources (HR) teams try to implement pulse surveys or employee feedback programs, one of the most common objections they hear is: Survey Fatigue. We want to discuss what survey fatigue is, what some of the common causes are, how it can impact your employee engagement efforts, and some ways to mitigate the effects.
A few years ago, Google conducted a study with their workforce to determine the factors that contribute to successful teams. They concluded: Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.
While this seems like a surprising result at first glance, anyone that follows sports can think of countless examples when adding a really good player actually made the team perform worse. The most recent example is when the Dallas Mavericks traded for Kyrie Irving. Prior to the trade, the Mavericks had a record of 28 wins and 26 losses, a 52% win rate. After the trade, the Mavericks had a record of 10 wins and 18 losses, a 36% win rate and missed the playoffs. So what’s going on?
The question we heard most frequently when we spoke to customers and potential customers was whether we offered an integration with Microsoft Teams. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re now officially integrated with Microsoft Teams!
If you don’t know and track your metrics, you can’t improve them.
Leaders know, you track the metrics you want to improve. If you don’t know where you are, how will you know if you are closer to where you want to be. Most companies, for example, implement complicated CRM systems to painstakingly track sales funnels against their quotas and quarterly projections with each team member logging in daily to view their progress. Without it, they know sales numbers will surely suffer. And worse, managers wouldn’t know if there was a problem until it was too late.
According to Organizational Psychologist Steven Rogelberg, there are 55 million meetings every day in the United States alone. They run the gamut from one-on-ones to stand ups to all hands to brainstorming sessions to team building, and many more. While some managers and even some employees enjoy meetings, research shows that only around 50% of meeting time is effective, with even lower rates for remote meetings. According to one study, the cost of these poorly organized meetings in the US is nearly $400 billion dollars!
Over the years in an effort to get a better handle on how satisfied and engaged their employees are, companies have gathered feedback from their teams using employee engagement surveys. In more recent years, companies started adding pulse surveys to their arsenal of engagement tools; sometimes even replacing their existing engagement surveys. So what is the difference between the two types of surveys and is one better? The short answer is both have a role just like tracking your daily steps and your annual physical each serve a different purpose, so do pulse and engagement surveys. Before delving into their different purposes, let’s first look at how both types of surveys are alike.
Just about every business has a sales team. The purpose of a business is to generate revenue, and usually the key to making that happen is to employ a sales team. Because of this simple fact, there are countless books, magazine articles, seminars, management courses, and the like all aimed at improving the effectiveness of a sales team. In fact, a Google search for “sales management strategies” produces 530 million results! The reason for all of this focus and attention is that sales can literally make or break your business, and serve as a crucial differentiator between your company and all of the other companies competing for those hard earned consumer dollars.
In the book “Predictably Irrational”, author Dan Ariely cleverly illustrates the difference between social norms and market norms with a cringy moment at a holiday meal. After finishing a Thanksgiving spread with all the delicious trimmings, a guest takes out his wallet and earnestly offers the host $300 for a lovely meal. Should the host be offended? Would you want to hide if the guest were your spouse? If you answered yes to either of these questions you are not alone.
In the third and fourth quarters of 2022, there was a wave of mass layoffs in the tech sector. Employees from Amazon, Carvana, Doordash, Meta, Peloton, and Snapchat, among many others, have been laid off. While the tech sector in general appears to be struggling in the current economy, there is one particular company that we wanted to take a closer look at: Twitter.
These days, our attention is a hot commodity. Companies and influencers are willing to spend a lot of time and money to grab it. Employers pay wages for it with the hope of reaping the benefit. While our attention flits from one topic to a meeting to an email to an article (cough, cough), perhaps it is worth turning our attention to where we can see a distinct return on our attention investment, checking in with our teams and gathering their feedback. But with so much already requiring our attention, why add more?
The first step in our pursuit of understanding employee happiness is listening.
When we set out to help companies shape happier employees, we wanted to hear from a wide range of people, not just leadership. It wasn’t difficult. Most people (adults) fit the criteria. They have been in the workforce at some point and they want to be happy.
Nearly three years since the Covid-19 pandemic turned the entire world upside down, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the way that work is done in many industries will never be the same again. Many service-oriented jobs necessitate in-person work, but many other jobs, particularly office-based jobs have been forever changed as employers have recognized the benefits of a fully remote or hybrid work environment.
When I see the word, contagion. It takes me back to 2020, with its abundance of masks and hand sanitizer. And its shortage of toilet paper and human contact.
For about a century, psychologists have been conducting studies to draw connections between employee (worker) happiness and the ability for those happy employees to produce more quantity and quality of work. Many of the earlier studies defined employee happiness as job satisfaction, and couldn’t quite draw a clear connection to productivity.
Employee pulse surveys are commonly used by companies to gather feedback from employees. These pulse surveys can help leaders get a better sense of employee sentiment, satisfaction, and engagement. The effectiveness of these surveys can vary depending on how they are administered. We believe anonymous surveys produce the best results. Here are the top 5 benefits of using anonymous employee pulse surveys.
Employee Net Promoter Score, often abbreviated as eNPS is based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) developed by Fred Reichheld. While the NPS was designed as a quick way to measure and gauge customer loyalty, the eNPS was designed to measure employee engagement and satisfaction.
With the Great Resignation driving concerns of turnover and retention, we wanted to take a closer look at one particular aspect that may be having a surprisingly large impact on your bottom line. Specifically, we wanted to dive deeper into the issue of New Hire Turnover, some of the causes, and how you can address it.
When employees “are” well; companies “do” well.
Since 2020, the global economy has undergone a massive shift due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many office-based jobs adapted and adopted work-from-home policies. Some have returned to the office, some have implemented a hybrid model, while others have kept the work-from-home policies in place. On the other hand, many service jobs were forced to totally shut down, then re-opened and had to navigate mask policies for both their employees and customers. The fallout from this uncertainty and structural change has resulted in the Great Resignation, followed by Quiet Quitting.
When we built Swell to help companies measure employee engagement, we had technology companies and engineering teams in mind. Technology companies already leverage observability platforms to monitor every aspect of their servers and services. We thought we could take a similar approach to observability with employee engagement as the primary metric.
There are countless studies that show the importance of happiness on a variety of personal outcomes. On a personal level, increased happiness has been linked to success, generosity, kindness, and improved health. The country of Bhutan has even made an effort to promote the concept and importance of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which emphasizes sustainability, culture, and good governance over Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which prioritizes economic output.
Hello and welcome to the Swell Blog. This is where our team will post about various topics including best practices, new features, developments in the world of pulse surveys, and other random thoughts.