A client experience: Two years of asking “How are you?” every week

Two years ago we made the switch to start using Nic Marks’ Friday Pulse and we haven’t looked back. I will admit that when our CEO Jaye told me about the tool, I was a sceptic… another tool. I have seen them all over the years, and so many feel like gimmicks. But Friday Pulse is different.

If you are unaware of it, it’s a simple tool that asks our team one main question each week: How happy were you at work this week? It then tracks that at a company level and, more importantly, at a team level too All backed by the science of Nic’s 25 years of measuring happiness.

It sounds soft, but it isn’t. Here is why we do it and what we have seen from 104 weeks of data!

The process over the platform

We have long tried to be the happy performance agency and have put happiness to the centre of what it means to be Loller. We didn’t bring in Friday Pulse as a tool to try and fix our culture; we bought it to help us build a process.

Every Thursday at 9am the survey goes out. It takes two minutes to complete. It's completely anonymous, our team rates their week from 1 to 5, and they can add celebrations, frustrations and ideas to make things better.

By 10am each Monday, we have a new agency data point.

We don’t focus on or indeed hide from a bad week here or there – this is agency land, we have all had those – a client leaves, a sale drops late, or it's just been one of those weeks where problems combine. If a team’s score drops three weeks in a row, we now have a process problem or a resource problem. The key, though, is that we can see it before, hopefully, it becomes a resignation problem.

We also talk openly about the results every week, at a company level. Through the highs and the lows, we have built the ritual of talking through the score, celebrating the wins and allowing the team a platform to share their frustrations. We have done this over 100 times in that 2-year period, missing it only when it was unavoidable.

Some numbers from 24 months usage

We don't just collect this data to look at a dashboard. We use it. Over the last two years the numbers have told a clear story:

• 80% average response rate: This is our most important metric and the only one that we have a target for. If people stop filling it in, they’ve checked out. High participation means the team still believes we will listen and act.
• 1,590 "Thank You" notes shared: 1,590 individual thank yous have been sent. In a busy agency, it’s easy to forget to say well done. This process makes it a habit.
• 695 Celebrations: That is nearly 700 wins, big and small, shared across the agency.
• 134 Frustrations shared: These aren't usually big issues. They are things like slow laptops or messy briefs. In an agency, small frictions kill productivity. We use this list to clear the path for the team.
• 122 ideas submitted: Like the frustrations, we try not to let these disappear into the void, and as an ops person, these are some of the most valuable bits of feedback we get on how to improve things. We have seen these broadly fall into 3 categories: Process tweaks, Suggestions for team building or office environment improvements or Efficiency suggestions around new tools or scripts to speed up or automate
• Happiness as a KPI: Our scores average around 71. When that dips, it’s a leading indicator. We usually see a dip in happiness two weeks before we see a dip in performance.

Why it matters for Launch

Agency land is high pressure. We are no different. The platforms change every week (Meta seems to introduce a bug daily at the moment – there were actually 34 mentions of Meta in the data, with most falling into the frustrations category!) and the stakes are always high for clients.

If we want the team to perform on the tools, they need to feel heard. Most agencies wait for an annual review to ask how things are going. By then, it's too late. The person has already updated their CV.

Friday Pulse gives us a feedback loop that matches the pace of our work. It’s a weekly health check for the business.

It’s not a silver bullet though

A tool won't save a bad manager, and it won't fix a toxic environment. But importantly it does make it impossible to ignore the truth.

If the data shows people are unhappy, you must talk about it. As I have said, we discuss the scores in our Tuesday all-hands meetings. We don't hide the bad weeks. We admit them and encourage the teams to talk about them in their groups, and we ask what needs to change.

Two years in and the biggest takeaway, I think, is that happiness is a leading indicator of performance. When the scores are high, the work is better. It’s as simple as that.

If you’re interested in measuring happiness in your teams like Launch does, you can try Friday Pulse for free.