My general approach to fixing almost any organizational problem starts with “make it visible”. Make the problem visible enough and sometimes other people will step in and fix it without any effort on my part.
There is one big exception to this approach however, and it just came up in a conversation.
That’s when we’re trying to fix a morale problem. Many companies will start by trying to visualize “team happiness” with something like a Niko-Niko calendar, and this can backfire spectacularly.
First, the companies that try to track happiness/morale, already know they have a problem or they wouldn’t have asked for this. Second, when the results come in and show that teams are not happy, management rarely does anything positive to address that. Why do I say that? Because the companies that already have a good plan to address morale/happiness, don’t start by asking people to quantify how they feel.
So now we’ve made it really visible that there’s a morale problem, and that we’re not willing to do anything about it, so morale drops even further, which gets even lower scores, which we again do nothing about.. and it spirals downwards.
So now when I hear a company say they want to start tracking happiness, I ask them what specific actions they’ll take when the results show that the teams are not happy. If they don’t have a solid plan already, I advise them not to track it at all. If you’re not prepared to fix it, don’t make it visible. That’s just going to make it worse.