The HR Trend Institute dived into the latest trends in employee mood measurement.

Our Celpax device with its smiley buttons was included among the providers.

You need to do more than just measure right?

Tom Haak’s conclusion is that measuring is not enough and here at Celpax we wholeheartedly agree. You measure to improve things at work right?

At Celpax we see a transformation taking place in workplaces:

Companies are moving away from once-a-year project where you have an initial requirement analysis, which leads to designing actions to be implement, which leads to a project definition, implementation, quality assurance, etc. They are moving to an iterative - incremental - or agile project delivery.

Simply put: Leaders make smaller changes, more often.

…and when you change a complex system with small incremental changes the following question needs to be answered constantly:

Are we advancing in the right direction? Analytics are key in answering that question.

Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Every time a change or an experiment is performed in the workplace it must show up on our analytics system and help us answer the question above.

Cause here’s the thing.

When employees provide feedback they would like to see action taken within days.

Active listening by taking action is in itself a motivator. Even when the action is only an experiment that turns out to fail.

Celpax has been designed from the ground up to be an effective analytics system for agile workplace improvement.

Employees answer the question “How was your day?” while leaving work by pressing a red or green physical button. The day results is displayed to the employee after pressing, and the online dashboard displays all data.

So here we go go, the main differentiators of our system are:

1. Data point volume

The Celpax has been designed to generate as many data points as possible. Most deployments generate more data points than employees every week, our best deployments more than triple that amount.

This is made possible by two things:

• Ergonomics: The device is normally placed where the eyes and the hand of the employee is going to be on the way back home. Typical good examples of Celpax installation are by the switch that opens the exit door and by the clocking device in manufacturing environments.
• Simplicity: from the employee point of view, there is no installation, no passwords, no applications to open. The device is just there on the natural way out leaving work, they are not even required to remember to press, it just naturally happens.

The effectiveness of the analytics system is proportional to the amount of data available.

As a result some of our customers have been able to:

• Detect major Engagement crisis before they actually take place
• Organize a company wide day out to discuss a crisis spotted with an unprecedented intensity
• Factories able to correlate Mood KPI to daily productivity. One of our customers was able to calculate financial impact (due to productivity losses) of a technology rollout that heavily frustrated employees

The Mood KPI baseline is used as a predictor of business performance and apart from productivity it’s crosschecked with safety incidents, retail sales, etc.

2. Data point Resolution

Such a data point volume and the fact that they are captured on an hourly basis brings intelligence with an unprecedented resolution.

To name a few examples:

• A Unilever factory was able to automatically detect a major production issue “last Tuesday on the night shift”. Unnecessary employee frustration appeared due to technical issues. This frustration might not have surfaced to be assigned the right priority or effectively escalated had it not been for the automatic detection.
• Customers are able to detect how employees react to announcements of changes that have been introduced, by checking the impact of the announcement on the mood of the day.

You’ll see if there’s an impact: “We got a 20% bump in green as we tested leaving fruit in the kitchen yesterday”, one Swedish company got 100% RED when a popular manager announced departure, another company plummeted to 40% green the day of their staff party (which was mandatory outside of office hours), etc.

It’s like Google Analytics. It doesn’t tell you what the problem is with your web site, but if you try fixing something, you see if it has an impact or not. If it didn’t work it doesn’t matter, you didn’t lose anything, and you move on to try the next thing.

It’s a Do-It-Yourself methodology where you don’t have to rely on consultants and go through the traditional project steps of getting feedback, designing changes, implementing, etc that easily take 6 months. Meanwhile, colleagues are still annoyed by what doesn’t get fixed.

What is it that needs to be fixed in your work culture? Your people already know! You could have talked to people using the wisdom of the crowd technique to get indications and have tried ten things in the same period as the traditional approach took you, and avoided paying 30K to a consultant.

3. Data point Quality and Contamination

The data points that employees generate must be private without any reasonable doubt. For two reasons:

• It is the right thing to do.
• It is well known that people under suspicion of surveillance modify their behaviors, which effectively contaminates data and limits its volume.

For example: under suspicious of surveillance and management by fear, employees might press more green as they believe it’s in their interest.

However, under good leadership employees may feel free to press red, as critical feedback is normally accepted.

This situation might bring a totally wrong picture to top management.

Is therefore crucial that employees have no suspicion of surveillance and are totally free to provide positive or negative feedback without any reservation.

Celpax achieves this by the following means:

• A physical device: in the electronic surveillance era, an application on your mobile or on your PC generates suspicion among employees: in particular those working for huge corporations with endless resources. A physical device that everybody presses is inherently private.

• The question: “How was your day?” crosses the personal and professional lives of an employee. Under fear conditions employees can always offer a personal excuse (their kid is ill, or they got a parking ticket) would they feel compelled to justify their red pulse. On the other hand best leaders “hire the whole person” both personal and professionally, so the question is most appropriate.

4. Data point Normalization

All Celpax deployments follow the same ergonomics: the device is placed where the hand and eyes of the employee are going to be on their way home.

All Celpax users answer the same question: How was your day?

As a result our database is useful for our entire customer base as a whole. We are easily able to answer questions for our Customers such as:

• Is my device properly installed? Am I generating the right amount of pulses?
• My Mood KPI is down 20%: is that because it is winter? (No, in your geography there are companies with a Mood KPI that’s 20% above yours. So no, it’s not the winter.)
• Is My Mood KPI good or bad for a Factory / blue collar environment?
• Is it realistic for us to set up a goal of reaching XXX mood KPI by the end of the year?
• I have reached a XXX mood KPI, is this the best that can be done?

Fun!

A physical device adds to the fun factor and visualizes that you prioritize employee morale.

When confronted with two choices –press green or red – it helps employees reflect on their workday/s.

Agile Methodologies and Analytics have already transformed many corporate areas: from the way we build new products to how we engage customers.

Celpax is bringing this transformation to the way we build great workplaces.

Last but not least our data show…

We’re a for-profit, we want to have a positive social impact.

How can we get more people to wake up in the morning and feel good about going to work?

We see companies with a stable Employee Mood KPI at 8% green, and others at 98%.

Our data show that workplaces that regularly have face-to face conversations improve their Mood KPI the fastest. Hence we do our best to trigger that these happen

 

Like what we do? Help us spread the word, or get your hands on a Celpax device.

 

 

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