Predicting burnout before it happens
Have you ever had really low energy in life? Were you feeling detached from things, like you were drifting? When it was happening, did you struggle to focus and feel your productivity at work had dropped?
How happy are you at work? Our new individual happiness test, FridayOne looks at your interactions with your team, your role and your organization. A learning feedback loop that can help you reflect and highlights what at work is working well and what isn’t.
Happiness is good for everyone, so we’ve created FridayOne — an individual Happiness Test — to help you reflect on how happy you are at work. It scores you against our Five Ways to Happiness at Work and benchmarks you against your peers. But, most important of all, this five-minute test gives you a personalised report packed with insights and tips.
With pandemic fatigue and burnout on the near horizon, it’s important to take a step back and take care of yourself. We wanted to create a test that could help you evaluate how to improve your work life. The test had to not only be fun and informative but also psychometrically robust and useful. On top of that, we wanted to be sure we could provide you with immediate insight.
FridayOne is our self-reflection tool that works on the individual level. It acts as both a window and a mirror into your work life. As a mirror, it reflects back to you how happy you are at work. As a window, it gives you new ways of seeing how you can improve your work life.
Some of you may have completed one (or more) of the popular free personality tests. While they are fun, they tend to suffer from an intrinsic flaw: our personalities are not fixed. In different settings or times of day or year, we take on different personas. Think about how you can be a “different” person at work than when you’re out socialising. That makes defining a personality a difficult challenge. Statistically, we know that your results can change significantly depending on the mood you’re in when you take the test, as well as where you’re taking it.
Context defines how we express ourselves. FridayOne is designed to work with a single context in mind: your work life.
Yet, even narrowing the scope to focus on your work life, we know that test results are only a snapshot in time. That means when the context changes, your scores will change as well.
Our tool looks at your interactions with your team, your role and your organization. These variables are always changing, and there are many different combinations that affect your happiness at work. For instance, you may be a bad fit for a role but enjoy the team you’re working with. You may have a good role but dislike your organisation. You may love your company’s purpose but have problems with its culture.
The only thing that remains constant in these changing contexts is YOU. You bring yourself to work including your strengths, skills, ambitions and past experiences. The truth is that all of us have the potential to thrive, or not, in different jobs and different workplaces.
FridayOne will help you identify how you are doing right now in your current position.
The Five Ways to Happiness at Work
Like the Friday Pulse platform, we’ve based FridayOne on our Five Ways
to Happiness at Work. This psychometrically-robust model allows us to
look at happiness at work through five drivers. Here’s a quick summary
of what they are:
The Test
During the course of the test, you’ll answer questions that address each
of the Five Ways. You’ll then be asked some broad questions about your
occupation and demographics so we can benchmark you against your peers.
Once completed, you can download your results.
Note: If you’re trying to track whether your situation has improved, you may want to retake the test in a few months’ time.
Once you’ve taken the test, the following questions may help you reflect on your results:
What surprises you the most?
Or in other words, what are you aware of now? And, why are you
surprised? Often these are things that we may have suspected and been
unable to articulate. It’s ok if the numbers are surprising. It’s not a
condemnation of you or your work. Remember that it’s a mirror, a look at
where you are now.
How might you influence your lowest scores?
Ideally, we hope that FridayOne is a tool that can help you improve your
work situation. In that light, it’s important to think about the things
you can improve. When looking at your lowest scores, consider if they
are things you can change or things you actually want to change.
Before making changes, think about who can help you on this journey. Do you have friends or mentors that can help? These are significant choices that will affect our experience of the place we spend most our time in as working adults.
Do you stop and reflect on the things that you have done?
Using the tool is the beginning of a learning feedback loop that can
help you reflect and improve. Ultimately, the whole point of the tool is
to draw your attention to what is working well in your working life and
what isn’t.
Because of negative bias, we have a tendency to focus on what’s going wrong rather than what’s going well in our lives. So, don’t forget to celebrate your wins. Enjoy them. As you’re reflecting, consider how you can further play to your strengths, not just coach your weakness.
FridayOne is a snapshot of how you’re doing at a specific moment in time. But, if you’re ready to take workplace happiness seriously, Friday Pulse can help. Designed to track employee, team and organizational happiness, our people platform asks employees how they feel at work, giving senior leaders real-time insights into how individuals and teams are faring.
Right now, as COVID-19 weariness continues and many organizations are still experiencing a decline in employee wellness, we are offering companies and teams (50+ employees) free access to our people platform for 3 months.* For more information on how we can support your organisation please reach out to us today.
*Offer ends midnight Thursday 31 December 2020.
Broaden your understanding of emotions in the workplace with more comprehensive articles on the science of happiness.
Have you ever had really low energy in life? Were you feeling detached from things, like you were drifting? When it was happening, did you struggle to focus and feel your productivity at work had dropped?
It's been an up and down few years to say the least. To stay competitive in challenging times, leaders need to ensure they have the right people. And, while the eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) can help track whether teams are working well together, it is not a headline indicator of employee experience, and it should not be how companies think of wellbeing.