How to Measure Employee Experience

Seated in the midst of a park with the sun streaming onto his face ever so often, Sami Kalillo, the CEO of Happy Signals, could not have asked for a more apt setting to talk to us about the value of a good, healthy employee experience. Happy Signals helps their customers improve their internal services’ performance, by measuring, analyzing, and optimizing employee happiness and productivity. 

Sami tells us that they measure employee happiness in terms of employees losing their time because of a poor employee experience. “We measure user happiness. We see how happy the employees are with their ITSM services, or HR, or finance, or any service.” 

But there is another unique approach the company takes. They not only measure how happy people are, but ask them to estimate how much time they end up losing because of any IT incident or request. 

It is quite interesting to note that on an average, the time lost per incident in IT is about three hours. But if your end users are happy with the solution they have received, they estimate that they have lost only about one or two hours on average. On the other end, if they are dissatisfied and unhappy with their service, they will estimate to have lost an average of a seven and a half hours! 

“Clearly there is much to gain from optimizing your service desk from the end user perspective,'' Sami says. Instead of optimizing only inside IT, he suggests we optimize the entire process of how a ticket is handled from start to end. Being sensitive to the end-users perspective means we will be able to help them be more productive. Ultimately we all want to get better at what we’re doing, Sami reminds us, so that there is holistic business value for the whole organization and not just the IT department. 

This brought up the next question for me. While measuring employee experience sounds ideal, what are the practical ways to go about achieving this? 

Time is all about perception


“You have to always remember, that time is all about perception,” says Sami. At Happy Signals, whenever a ticket is resolved, the survey sent out to gather experience feedback has a very vital question. “Please estimate how much time you lost during this process.”

It is important to remember that loss of work time for an employee starts not when they have raised a ticket, but when the issue first crops up for them. And the time they have lost on it comes to an end only when they have a final resolution for the issue. 

For example, they might even lose two whole days trying to solve the issue themselves before contacting the service desk. 

And finally it is important to keep in mind the principles of perception. 

Principles of perception


“When we get a survey response about an experience, we are only getting one person’s perception. So you have to take that into consideration when you are arriving at the metrics that work for you,” says Sami. 

When you start to put these trends and specifics into practice and change things to suit this, you will start seeing different results. 

There are many small ways to establish practices within your company that can elevate the employee experience. 

For example, if you train service desk agents to work differently or if you have a new service desk portal up and running, that may work in your favor by bringing a quicker end to employee problems. 

And from a business perspective, you are saving time for the business and enabling your employees to have a more efficient experience. And that is a big, concrete takeaway that shows the value of these metrics. 

So, when we measure employee experience from the perspective of the number of hours lost for the employee, we will be able to arrive at a tangible method that helps us account for employee happiness!

Well, this was certainly a huge takeaway for us and a new perspective to think from! What did you think? Tell us in the comments below.

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