What has increased productivity got to do with employee happiness?

HappySignals provides an independent benchmark for the Service Management employee experience, that we call the Happiness Score™. 

Our customers are large global enterprises and we have already measured employees’ experiences right across managed services, mostly in IT, but also in HR, Finance and Business services. We ask employees to rate their service experience, but also to tell us how much of their time was lost during the service experience.

The average lost worktime currently amounts to around 3 hours per ticket but, as you can see in Figure 1, the worst-performing companies lose double that. When you consider that a 10,000-employee company might have 80,000 tickets annually, the lost hours start to add up.

One of the interesting things we’ve discovered is how closely happiness correlates with increased productivity. Based on Happiness Score™ figures, there is a gap of 4.5 hours per ticket between companies with happy employees and those with unhappy employees. Of course, you can never completely eliminate lost productivity, but there are huge gains to be made if you are at the wrong end of the lost productivity spectrum.

However you score, there is an even more important message here. As you move away from the standard SLA-driven model and start to prioritise lost productivity, you might decide to set yourself a target for lost work time to be saved over the next year; let’s say 15 minutes per ticket.

That 15-minutes-per-ticket of lost productivity saved will almost certainly add up to more money than the work needed to achieve that saving.

Alternatively, if you have an internal service desk, it gives you the means to prove the business value of employee services to stakeholders and explain why cutting budgets in that area is counterproductive. You can also make a business case for using AI / Automation Engines to reduce the ticket volumes as you can now put a financial value on each ticket that the system saved from being opened.

Check out our 2-minute video to see how our Employee Experience Measurement tool works!

Stay Happy!

Pasi Nikkanen
Chief Product Officer
pasi.nikkanen@happysignals.com