We’ve learned that the answer to the above question is: No, there isn’t.

Or at least we haven’t found it. That’s not to say we aren’t happy employees. In fact, I’d say our team is as happy as we’ve ever been – as evidenced by the laughter and smiles I see at our team meetings, the energy I hear in people’s voices, and the amazing new people we’ve been hiring.

It just hasn’t come easy. Nor are we quite “there” yet.

We’ve delved deeply into employee happiness over the past year and it’s been worth every ounce of energy we’ve put into it. Not only have we become a happier team, but we’ve become a better company for it.

What we’ve learned over the past year

Last June, we connected with Mika Kim, the Chief Happiness Officer at Place of the Future. Place of the Future helps companies measure and improve worker happiness. I was thrilled when Mika reached out to us and offered us her services, because I’m really excited about employee happiness (and I’ve even given myself the title Happiness Engineer).

Mika suggested the following plan:

• All the employees at Exygy would fill out a survey Mika created called the Worker Happiness Index.
• Mika would aggregate the results, show us our scores and how we stacked up against other companies that have taken the survey.
• Lastly, Mika would give us some quick and easy things we could do to improve our overall employee happiness.

What we thought would happen

It sounded simple enough. We thought: Okay, so we’ll take this survey, find out some interesting things about ourselves, and then implement some of Mika’s suggestions and see what happens.

So we spent a good portion of one of our Monday morning team meetings taking the survey – each of us took it individually – and then Mika presented the results to us a few weeks later.

We scored pretty well overall, especially compared to other companies, but there were a few areas with room for improvement. The biggest issue for us turned out to be high levels of stress.

The biggest issue for us turned out to be high levels of stress

Mika gave us some suggestions on how we could lower our stress levels. Nothing major, just some “low-hanging fruit” as she called it. She suggested adding some small practices to our daily routines, such as gratitude journals and mindfulness.

What actually happened

We decided to let things marinate for a month or two before we acted on anything (or maybe we just got busy and our happiness discussions got put on the back burner).

When we picked the conversation back up, we talked about Mika’s suggestions, but we felt there were some deeper issues. We wanted to find out what was really causing our collective stress.

So we took a deep dive into our stress. We made a list of everything that was stressing us. Then we did our best to determine the root cause of each symptom, and tried to come up with a solution.

We took a deep dive into our stress

This process took several months – meeting as a team for an hour each Wednesday. But as I said before, it was worth every minute spent. We determined that a lot of the stressors were in fact growing pains.

We had really grown up as a company over the past couple years, and the systems and processes that used to work for us were starting to break down. There were certain things we could get by with as a smaller company, but would no longer fly now as we grow into a larger and more mature organization.

We realized we needed to create a whole new set of processes to support the growth of the company. If not, we’d face even more stress, leading to unhappy employees and, worse, unhappy clients.

At the time, it seemed an almost overwhelming task to make all of the changes we knew we needed to make. And it would have been impossible to implement them all at once.

What happens next?

In Part 2, I plan to share some of the steps we’ve taken to ensure we keep growing as a company and in a way that keeps us all happy.