Democracy at work boosts ‘happiness and profits’
‘‘Our goal is to build the happiest, most productive workplace in New Zealand,’’ says Nathan Donaldson, chief executive and founder of Boost, a Wellington company designing and building web and mobile apps.
‘‘You can’t be productive unless you are happy and you can’t be happy, if you are not productive,’’ Donaldson said.
Boost, which has 24 employees, started measuring happiness on a scale of 1-10 in mid-2015, and it has had a remarkable effect on its financial prospects.
‘‘As we have increased our happiness, our productivity has increased. Our revenue has increased along the same lines as our happiness. Our profits have increased. We made happiness our key metric a couple of years ago,’’ Donaldson said.
‘‘We started mid-sevens and are averaging just over nine now.’’
Measuring happiness was an experiment inspired by Boost’s membership of Worldblu, an American firm that helps companies and other organisations become democratic so that everyone has a voice, is involved in decision-making, is accountable, and feels valued.
‘‘When you start to pay attention to happiness, you start to think about the things that are making people unhappy,’’ said Donaldson. ‘‘You can’t really make people happy but you can make them unhappy.’’
This isn’t about increasing happiness by putting in a better coffee machine – what Donaldson calls ‘‘surface-level happiness’’ – or ‘‘join-a-cult, dance-around happiness’’.
‘‘It is: am I doing something that is meaningful? Am I making the world a better place?
‘‘That is where real happiness comes from,’’ he said. ‘‘It is about creating safe-to-fail environments where people can experiment and take chances to do more, and be more.’’
Measuring happiness also ended management’s ability to lie to itself. ‘‘There are lots of reasons why people don’t measure things.
‘‘Sometimes it is easier not to know,’’ Donaldson said.
The thing that lifted happiness the most was when the leadership held themselves to account better.
This included dealing with poor performance, Donaldson said. ‘‘I became aware quite a while ago that as the chief executive I was the main impediment to productivity, happiness, everything really. If there is a problem here, it ultimately sits at my door.’’
Being clear on values – respect, manaakitanga, responsibility, courage – is also key.
‘‘We have worked hard to make sure these are things that are representative in the behaviours of the team.’’
Love has also become a word that gets used in Boost nowadays.
‘‘There is a lot more respect for everyone in the office,’’ said finance manager Ruka Ikeda, who returned to office life at Boost after working remotely for five years. ‘‘I noticed when I came back a lot of words like compassion, empathy.
‘‘Showing people come from a place of love, and being understanding, which are definitely words we didn’t use before.’’
Love? ‘‘I was surprised when Nathan said it,’’ Ikeda said.
Donaldson said there had to be love in a workplace. ‘‘When we are working with people around their performance it is important we have love in our hearts as a starting place for it,’’ he said.
‘‘We have to want the best for that person. We have to care about that person, or we should not be working with that person.’’
One day, perhaps, NZX companies will report employee happiness as a top-line number alongside revenue and profitability.
This article is part of the Good Life Guide, an editorial project sponsored by Skoda. We have produced it independently, to the same standards applied to the rest of our journalism.