How are your staff really feeling?

At a recent Davines event, Bhutan’s former prime minister Dasho Tshering Tobgay dished the intel on measuring employee happiness

Last week, Creative HEAD was invited to a unique event at Davines House & Academy. A select group of guests were welcomed into its still immaculate London HQ, complete with wild plant walls and glassy skylights, to hear from group chairman Davide Bollati’s special guest Dasho Tshering Tobgay, a former prime minister of Bhutan.

Why was he there and what has all this got to do with hair? Well, because the former prime minister knows a lot about the hot topics of happiness and wellbeing, which are vital to any successful workplace, salons included. And his country measures it.

Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index is guided by the country’s Buddhist values that place emphasis on personal wellbeing, moving away from GDP as the sole indicator of development. Can we learn from this country’s example? Absolutely. Dasho even had some transferable advice for salon owners, including why measuring the happiness of their staff is so important.

With happiness and wellbeing becoming top-of-list demands for people in the workplace, employers can and should delve deeper into how their staff are feeling. Here’s what we took away…

1. Your team are more than numbers

Instead of seeing your workforce as numbers, think of the bigger picture and who else is affected by their employment with you. Dasho asked a salon owner how big his team was and the response was sixty-five, “that’s sixty-five families that depend on you,” he replied.

2. Do you REALLY know what’s going on?

Diving deeper, he asked the same salon owner a series of questions about his staff; “how many of them suffer from high blood pressure? How many have diabetes? How many have problems relating to stress and sleep? How many of them have thought of suicide?” The conclusion from the owner was that he only assumed things about his staff, and didn’t really know…

3. You CAN measure happiness

Move away from assumptions about your staff and measure their happiness. Use it to find out how many of your staff are healthy, how many aren’t, and other factors too like how secure women feel in the workplace, how staff relate to management, opinions on salary and career progression.

4. Let your values run deep

Embed your company values into the heart of your business, and it should run through employees to their families, who become stakeholders too. This way, employees become part of the “whole community that shares values and will rally around the company”, securing you real buy-in and faith in your brand.

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