David Creelman bumped into the Celpax device at the HR Tech conference in Las Vegas.

His conclusion was that vendors were more inclined to say their HR software was simple rather than say it was powerful.

This is assessment is reminiscent of the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion where evil space aliens insisted on asking the simple Yes/No question “Are you an effective team?”

Of course, Celpax isn’t run by space aliens.

It’s run by Swedes, however, the company has hit upon the same powerful idea:

That a single critical question captures most of what you need to know.

We live in a world of long employee surveys and sophisticated analytics. It is a real shock to our thinking to be presented with the idea that a single, simple question can accomplish a great deal.

What does the question accomplish?

First, simply by asking the question, management is signaling it cares.

However the real intervention is that the results are meant to spark a dialogue.

If the number of people having a good day goes down, it spurs management to ask “Why are so many people having a bad day?”

Sometimes a manager will be able to do something about it, sometimes not, but the mere fact they had that conversation will be helpful.

It seems strange to get excited over such a simple tool, but I’ll bet many a front-line manager will see its value.

• It will be interesting to correlate mood (as measured by this kind of simple test) with business outcomes like safety, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

 

• One HR professional suggested (perhaps tongue in cheek) that the technique should be used when people first come to work with the question being “Are you having a bad day?” If people answer “Yes” this HR pro would say “Don’t even bother to come in.”

• The most important tool in people management is dialogue. We need effective ways to spark that dialogue. Usually the only thing needed to spark an effective dialogue is a simple question and a caring manager.

Let’s not lose sight of the power of simplicity.

David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research. While he’s not at the HR Tech conference in Las Vegas, his main interest is helping HR leaders and CFOs better measure and report on human capital to the CEO, Board, and financial markets. He does writing, research, and speaking on the most critical issues in human capital management.

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