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Happiness Index 2016
Butterfly explored weekly employee happiness and engagement trends across more than 5,000 employees in the U.S. and EMEA. The following report outlines key themes and best practices for managers and HR professionals based on the data.
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Butterfly, the first mobile leadership training tool and chatbot, analyzed a sample of 5,000 users in the U.S. and EMEA to unearth trends in employee happiness across five engagement drivers. These drivers were identified as the top factors affecting employee satisfaction by academic researchers from the University of Oxford and Columbia University.
Employees were asked to rank their work satisfaction with each driver weekly, on a scale of 0 to 10.
Employees were also asked to indicate their overall happiness each week by responding to a simple prompt: “How is your week going?”
We tracked responses to the five drivers and overall happiness once a week, each week, from January to November 2016.
Roles & Responsibilities How employees feel about their specific role within the team and broader organization.
Management: How employees feel about their direct manager and overall management team at the organization.
Team’s Work / Colleagues: How employees feel about their peers within their specific teams and within the broader organization.
Workplace / Environment: How employees feel about the physical setting in which they work.
Work/Life Balance: How employees feel about the impact of their specific jobs on their overall lifestyles and/or family life.
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THE BIG PICTURETracking employee happiness over time Using Butterfly’s mobile leadership and employee feedback tool, 5,000+ employees in the U.S. and EMEA reported on their overall happiness and job satisfaction each week. The graph below illustrates the ebbs and flows of their overall happiness and job satisfaction as defined within five key drivers.
Read on to learn the key themes uncovered
Overall Happiness & Job Satisfaction Drivers Over Time
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Overall Happiness Roles & Responsibilities Management Team’s Work/Colleagues Work/Life Balance Work Environment
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HAPPINESS INDEXKey findings
After digging into the week-by-week data across markets, some interesting trends emerged – especially as it pertained to how employees felt about key drivers relative to overall happiness. Skip to the next page for a quick summary of those correlations.
Work/Life Balance was consistently the biggest pain-point for employees across all markets.
Average monthly ratings in this category were consistently the lowest across all five drivers.
Despite the stereotype that Europeans enjoy a more healthy integration of work and home life, EMEA employees were only slightly more satisfied than their U.S. counterparts when it came to Work/Life Balance.
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Work/Life Balance: U.S. vs. EMEA
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Of all categories, employees were most consistently satisfied by Team’s Work / Colleagues, followed by Management.
That said, Team’s Work / Colleagues demonstrated the lowest correlation among all drivers when it came to overall average happiness.
The chart below illustrates the relative correlation of each driver to overall happiness. Based on our data, Work/Life Balance was most correlated to overall happiness, followed by Workplace / Environment. Put a different way, if employees reported high scores for drivers that correlate closely to overall happiness, there was a greater chance that they were happier overall.
In terms of overall happiness, EMEA employees were consistently more satisfied at work than U.S. employees.
European happiness dipped lower than the U.S. average for all drivers during just a few short periods over the course of 2016.
Average employee happiness was the lowest in mid-April, followed by mid-February.
Employees showed the highest happiness scores in early September (around Labor Day), followed by the summer months (June to July) and late February.
Read on to learn what this means for you
Overall Happiness: U.S. vs. EMEA
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Correlation Coefficients Relative to Overall Happiness
Work/Life Balance
Workplace / Environment
Roles & Responsibilities
Management
Team / Colleagues
75%68%
59% 57%
45%
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TOP TAKEAWAYS FOR MANAGERSThe findings of our Happiness Index reveal actionable takeaways for managers and talent teams. Here’s how you can put this data to work to improve employee satisfaction and build stronger, more collaborative cultures.
There is a very strong correlation between Work/Life Balance and overall employee happiness.
Other drivers, such as team dynamics (defined here as (“Team’s Work / Colleagues”), while independently important, have less of an impact on overall employee happiness.
>> What this means for you: Managers and HR teams should be cognizant of workload and how team members collectively feel about the balance of their careers and home life. Per our findings, investing time and resources into improving Work/Life Balance will make a bigger impact on overall satisfaction than improving relationships between colleagues and improving the office environment. It is, quite simply, the most efficient way to increase overall employee happiness.
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The driver that least correlates with overall happiness is Team’s Work / Colleagues, meaning that promoting strong social relationships and friendships in the office, while nice to have, should not be prioritized over other tactics.
At the end of the day, Work/Life Balance; Management and Roles & Responsibilities exhibit a stronger correlation to overall happiness than the relationships employees build with co-workers and the general office environment (e.g. “work perks”). Focusing on increasing the former three areas will go the farthest when it comes to promoting employee happiness.
>> What this means for you: As was chronicled in Dan Lyons’ book, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble,” released in 2016, a common mistake among young companies is to over-prioritize the social and environmental aspects of work (e.g. having kegs in the office or a game room). While most employees appreciate work perks and forming friendships with their colleagues, these factors do not correlate as strongly as tactics such as helping teams understand the company vision and their own career paths within the organization.
Employee happiness wavered for reasons that could not be explained by macro-trends occurring in society and culture.
Per this study, dips in employee engagement were seemingly unrelated to factors such as quarterly transitions, holidays and even major cultural or geopolitical events, such as the historical Brexit vote (late June 2016) and the U.S. Presidential Election (November 2016).
>> What this means for you: Managers and HR teams able to track team happiness on a weekly basis will be better equipped to address fluctuations in job satisfaction as they happen. The most efficient way to markedly improve employee engagement and happiness is to create a consistent feedback loop and openly discuss workload so that team members know their employer prioritizes a healthy balance of career and lifestyle.
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Butterfly is the first-ever mobile management training and chat bot designed to develop the next generation of corporate leadership. Weekly pulse surveys allow managers and talent teams to view and act on data in real-time, and Butterfly’s self-learning virtual coach, Alex, is there every step of the way. Managers at companies like Coca-Cola, GE, Ticketmaster, Jet.com, Publicis and more rely on Butterfly to build stronger, happier teams.
Learn more about us at www.butterfly.ai.
“It makes a lot of sense to measure employee happiness in a way that transcends the workplace and thus presents a more holistic picture of the state of employee happiness. We know through research that the general wellbeing of an employee is causally related to productivity and performance — as such, managers are advised to look beyond just the traditional job satisfaction item and should seek to improve the work/life balance of employees, as the data from Butterfly clearly indicate."
Jan-Emmanuel de Neve Associate Professor Economics & Strategy Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
© 2016 Butterfly Great managers make great teams. Contact [email protected] for a live demo.
