b'18 Partner News Winter 2020EnterpriseThe pursuit of happinessFirstcos ViewDid you know that on average a full-timeIn light of this, we decided toon our intranet, all help to foster an worker spends around one-third of theirimplement some changes to be moreopen environment of communication life at work? Thats roughly 80,000in touch with our employees and feedback that both HR and the hours. We spend more time withwellbeing. Board of Directors regularly tap into.our colleagues than we do with the majority of our family and friends. One such initiative is our time-sheetWhen the emoticons were added last emoticons. These happy, and not so happyyear, we purposely didnt tell anyone So what happens when we dont enjoy whatfaces tell us how our employees are feeling. they were coming or offer guidance we do? What if we dread coming into work? When staff submit their time-sheets,on how to fill them in - after all, how What if this, in turn, has a detrimentalthey pick a face that best describesdo you tell someone how to feel?effect on both our mental and physicalhow they feel that week.health? After all, not everybody has theWeve learnt that some people luxury or privilege to be able to pick andThese emoticons have two main purposes: prefer to keep their emotions to choose how they earn their money. themselves and choose the middleBackground, finances, family, lifestyle1.Acting as a quantifiable(stoic) option each week, while others and other factors all contribute tomeasure regarding the generalgo through a whole range of feelings the work we end up doing. mood of the company. (and emoticons) depending on where 2.To notify us when an employeeand what they are working on at the As the saying goes: Some workis not enjoying their work or istime as well as any influences in theirto live, others live to work.feeling generally unhappy. personal lives. Because of this, and when it comes to reviewing the So how does a company ensure that theirWe have multiple project teams withinresults, we look for these patterns employees are okay and how did we as anthe business, covering both engineeringand trends and account for them.employer look at this problem and set out to and operational staff. Because of this, gauge the happiness levels of ourmonitoring how people are doing andHow do we analyse the data?employees? It all started 12 monthsfeeling when theyre on-site or workingThe first thing we do is convert the ago. As a company, we found ourselvesmultiple night shifts can prove tricky asemoticons into numbers. We give each progressively focusing on wellness. Its easythe conversation window is much smaller. emoticon a score, from -2 to +2; then we to think that you do enough as a business,take an average of the scores from eachbut here at Firstco, we know that thereAlongside the emoticons, we send outweeks time-sheets which gives us an overall is always more to be improved upon. monthly pulse surveys which allow ourhappiness score for the whole company.Today, the stigma of talking aboutemployees to voice their views on a variety wellness and mental health isof topics, either openly or anonymously. Weve found that a pattern has emerged, fortunately firmly removed and as such,This initiative combined with ourwith more happiness spikes during key we aim to keep the conversation performance management system, a regulartimes such as summer holidays, birthdays going any way we can. company newsletter and announcementsand Christmas. As time progresses, we'