The Kiwi company that measures happiness

Tuesday, 13 August 2019

Wellington company Boost started measuring staff happiness in 2015.

'Our goal is to build the happiest, most productive workplace in New Zealand,' says Nathan Donaldson, chief executive and founder of Boost, a Wellington company designing and building web and mobile apps.

'You can't be productive unless you are happy, and you can't be happy, if you are not productive.'

Boost, which has 24 employees, started measuring happiness on a scale of 1-10 in mid-2015, and it's had a remarkable effect on the company's financial prospects.

'As we have increased our happiness, our productivity has increased. Our revenue has increased along the same lines as our happiness. Our profits have increased.'

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Wellingon company Boost has made measuring happiness a key part of its day-to-day. Pictured: Nathan Donaldson - founder and CEO and Ruka Yamakami - Agile Coach

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'We made happiness our key metric a couple of years ago,' Donaldson said.

'We started mid-sevens and we are averaging just over nine now.'

Measuring happiness was an experiment inspired by Boost's membership of WorldBlu, a US company that helps companies and other organisations become democratic so everyone has a voice, everyone is involved in decision-making, everyone is accountable, and everyone is valued.

'When you start to pay attention to happiness, you start to think about the things that are making people unhappy,' Donaldson said.

'You can't really make people happy, but you can make them unhappy.'

This isn't about increasing happiness by putting in a better coffee machine, what Donaldson calls 'surface-level happiness', or 'join-a-cult, dance-around happiness'.

'It's am I doing something that's meaningful. Am I making the world a better place. That's where real happiness comes from,' he said.

'It's about creating safe-to-fail environments where people can experiment and take chances to do more, and be more.'

Measuring happiness also ends management's ability to lie to itself.

'There's lots of reasons why people don't measure things. Sometimes it's easier not to know,' Donaldson said.

The thing that lifted happiness the most was when the leadership held themselves to account better.

This included dealing with poor performance in some parts of the organisation, Donaldson said.

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'I became aware quite a while ago that as the CEO I was the main impediment to productivity, happiness, everything really.

'If there was a problem here, it ultimately sits at my door.'

Being clear on values — respect, manaakitanga, responsibility, courage — is also key.

'We've worked hard to make sure these are things that are representative in the behaviours of the team, and not aspiration Enron-style values,' Donaldson said.

Love has also become a word that gets used in Boost nowadays.

'There a lot more respect for everyone in the office,' said finance manager Ruka Yamikami, who returned to office life at Boost after working remotely for five years.

'I noticed when I came back a lot of words like compassion, empathy. Showing people come from a place of love, and being understanding, which are definitely words we didn't use before.'

'By using those words and thinking from the other person's perspective has changed how we view people.'

Love?

'I was surprised when Nathan said it,' Yamikami said.

Donaldson said there had to be love in a workplace.

'When we are working with people around their performance it is important we have love in our hearts as a starting place for it,' he said.

'We have to want the best for that person. We have to want the best for that person. We have to care about that person, or we should not be working with that person.'

One day, perhaps, NZX companies will report employee happiness as a top line number alongside revenue and profitability.

'Maybe CEOs will be asked to measure and have happiness as a key performance metric,' Donaldson said.

Donaldson believed they would not regret it.

'There's enough unhappiness in the world without inviting it. The reality is the results we get for our clients are really quite astounding. They're happy. We're happy.'

Donaldson did not believe large companies could not be happy workplaces. It was easy for larger companies to become bureaucratic, but Donaldson said two companies he visited in the US on his journey to become a better leader, showed larger companies can be happiness-focused and successful too.

They were lubricant maker WD40, and the Belgium Beer Company, the latter which had over 600 employees who actually own the business.

'Zappos is another. They are massive, and they are really big on happiness,' Donaldson said.

* This article is part of the Good Life Guide, an editorial project sponsored by Skoda. We have produced it independently, to the same standards applied to the rest of our journalism. Read more about our partnership content here