Do you know the shortest path in order to make your team members the most productive, loyal, and creative at the same time? Make them happy.
And there’s an astonishing body of research to back up this formula. Happy developers write better code, and they do it faster. Happy sales people produce 37% greater sales. Happiness has a direct link to our health. Happy people take fewer sick days. Happiness leads to increased motivation, confidence, and job longevity.
However if we want to help our colleagues and employees to become happier, we need to know when they are NOT happy.
It’s easy when you work in the same office next to each other. Often you know right away when your colleagues are struggling with something.
But when your team is remote, it’s not that easy anymore. Trying to decipher how your colleagues feel by analyzing Slack messages or brief Zoom meetings might be a bit challenging.
It’s especially a problem in teams with a low-trust environment where team members won’t share their sincere feelings even when asked directly. Some managers might never get to the bottom of why their teams are unhappy, disorganized, and unproductive.
It’s a time ticking bomb for every company. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
As a team that worked remotely for 10 years we know these struggles all too well. After all, our Geekbot was built to help remote teams become more effective and happy at the same time.
Today, when so many teams are working remotely, we want to take our efforts one step further.
Meet Well Being Templates.
What Are The Well-Being Templates?
On the surface, Geekbot’s Well-Being templates are a series of short questions that your team members will receive.
These questions are specifically designed to be more approachable to the team members.
Those templates are built with the best team wellness practices in mind so that managers can quickly shed light on why their teams are unhappy and unproductive.
Our team uses these templates regularly, and now having tested them within ourselves we want to share them with our community.
There are three main templates that we’re adding to the Geekbot library of templates.
Every template serves a particular purpose such as managers becoming more proactive in taking care of their people in order to avoid burnout events while improving their team’s motivation. So let’s briefly cover each one of them.
Well-Being Template #1: Well-Being Check-In
With Well-Being Check-in, team members take a few minutes to anonymously answer the questions about their stress, happiness, communication, mental health, work/life balance, and work progress.
Anonymity allows team members to express their sincere concerns and struggles even in teams struggling with low transparency and low trust culture.
Questions are designed the way that team members won’t spend more than a few minutes answering them, which ensures that team members will provide their answers regularly.
Analyzing team-wide feedback from Well-Being Check-In, managers can:
- Find out problems that their team currently struggles with, and instantly see areas of improvement
- Analyze feedback patterns over time and uncover deeper issues that undermine team’s efficiency and well-being
- Improve team trust and transparency by regularly and properly addressing team issues
- Proactively address smaller issues before they start affecting employees health and well-being on a bigger scale
Well-Being Template #2: Work From Home
Due to the recent outbreak many employees were forced to work from home. For many of them this isn’t an easy ride.
Even at best times people who are used to working remotely struggle with loneliness, distractions, and work / life balance. These issues are multiplied by such an abrupt switch.
If your company struggles with a sudden transition to remote work, or if you want to check on your remote employees and help them make work from home easier, use the Work From Home Template.
Work from home, as good and convenient as it may be, can result in: Uneven work life balance, spending too much time looking for information or even not having enough contact with your teammates and manager could be some of the problems that may arise, but can easily be overcome with our simple template. The Work from Home template helps you to regularly monitor the well-being of your remote employees and proactively uncover issues that negatively affect their work experience.
Note: in case your whole organization went remotely overnight, the Work From Home report will help you to gain a bigger picture of your transition, uncovering team-wide issues such as poor communication or ambiguity, and resolve them on a company level.
Well-Being Template #3: Personal Journal
The “Personal Journal” is designed to help every team member separately to stay connected with what matters to them the most.
Just think about it for a second…
“Hey Stef, it’s time to take a breath 🧘 enjoy a two-minute pause ⏰ and reflect on what you want to achieve today 📔”
Cool right?
This template includes three simple, but meaningful questions on gratitude, affirmation, and intention.
Providing daily answers to these questions, employees regularly connect with their big “WHY”, which allows them to produce meaningful work and set the positive vibe for the rest of the day.
Employees who find their work meaningful are more productive and 69% less likely to plan on quitting their jobs.
If your company struggles with high turnover-rate and low motivation, The Personal Journal template might just be your solution.
Keeping Teams Happy
We’re expanding our existing sentiment graph with these well-being templates because we want to support teams and provide them with all the necessary tools that can help them become happy.
From our personal experience we know that the happy team is the best team, and we’re set to support our clients and customers to become just that: happy teams.
If your team is struggling with low employee productivity, unnecessary meetings, low team morale, and distorted communications, try our free Geekbot trial version for Slack.
Let us know if we could help you, because your success is our success.
