Introducing Friday Pulse to your team

What is Friday?

Friday Pulse is a platform that measures the happiness of our team and organization. It will be able to show each of us how happy we are at work and it’ll show us our team and organization scores, all the while protecting our anonymity. Read more about how your anonymity is protected here.

From our second week using Friday Pulse, the platform will ask us to reflect on how happy we feel each week. It then asks us to share publicly any celebrations and frustrations. We also get the opportunity to send thank-you notes to colleagues.

Around each quarter often Friday Pulse will ask us a few more questions on the drivers of happiness at work, so we can map our experience to key action areas for improvement.

Why happiness?

Happiness and how it applies to work is a relatively new area of research – which turns conventional thinking on its head.

Success doesn’t lead to happiness; happiness leads to success.

Friday Pulse is built around happiness – and all the experiences that help us feel happy at work – because:

• Positive emotions improve physical health, psychological well-being and social connections
• Moments of positivity, especially with others, nurture and energize us
• We are more likely to explore, learn, think creatively, trust and achieve more when feeling positive

At work, these effects mean positive emotions are the little engines of career and culture building.

• Teams with greatest positivity outperform other teams
• Happy organizations have higher share prices, happier customers and more loyal staff

Can happiness be measured?

Yes! Researchers at Friday Pulse have spent years pioneering and refining measures of happiness and wellbeing robust enough to be used in global and national population surveys to influence government policy.

A unique aspect of Friday Pulse’s approach to measuring wellbeing is the emphasis they give to emotions (feelings) over cognitions (thoughts), and their use of subjective questions – which directly ask how we experience work. This is a very different starting point from most employee measurement approaches which use evaluative questions (like engagement) or objective measures (for instance, performance).

A consequence of Friday Pulse’s focus on happiness is a process that feels more human – and as useful to the individual and team as it is to HR and senior leaders.

What are we going to do with data on happiness?

Friday Pulse is built to collect, analyze and feedback data on how you’re feeling every week. This is our lead to meet and discuss scores as a team so we can dig a little deeper, to understand and improve – so next week goes even better. The presentation mode in Friday Pulse is a great way for us to have these conversations.

Over time our awareness will grow about what influences happiness at work. We will create a shared understanding about how our unique team culture can evolve to support greater wellbeing and performance.