Recently, I have been hearing around this “Productivity” thing and “How to improve our teams productivity?” a lot and decided to write this rant so you all know what I think about this subject.

I also wrote another article a while ago, which I talked about a more specific subject: “How to Improve Software Team’s Velocity”, though this is align the same lines with that one, but this will be a more generic subject and not specific to software teams.

What I am going to explain will hopefully help you to build a business case, to implement some processes in your team to improve your team’s productivity. Of course, if I am able to convince you at the end that you should really care about this, if you don’t care at the moment!

Why should we care about our team’s happiness?

Just in case you don’t really care as much about your team’s happiness, here some background for you that will hopefully help for us to be on the same page.

In year 2014 a study at Harward Business Review showed that, happy employees will save you money, lots of money!

Science is on our side: there are clear neurological links between feelings, thoughts, and actions. When we are in the grip of strong negative emotions, it’s like having blinders on. We focus mostly — sometimes only — on the source of the pain. We don’t process information as well, think creatively, or make good decisions. Frustration, anger, and stress cause an important part of us to shut down — the thinking, engaged part. Disengagement is a natural neurological and psychological response to pervasive negative emotions.

This study shows that, happy employees are, on average, 31% more productive, and 3 times more creative than others!

If you have unhappy employees, you are losing money

Here is some simple interesting math:

Amount of extra shit 3 happy employees get done (by being 31% more productive) = Stuff that 1 new employee would do

There, you just saved 100,000$ a year, (assuming an employee costs you 100 grand a year, which for more professional jobs, it would cost you way more)

So based on just this (of course If you believe in science and Global Warming!) you should be on-board to make some investment to make sure your team is happy!

There are of course tons of other reasons for us to care about our team’s happiness, like: If we are known in town as a company with such culture that cares about our people, then obviously all the good talents in town will be lining up to join us, and obviously with all the good brains with us, success comes next.

Unhappy employees affecting Global Economy

Yes, sounds crazy, but it’s true. Unhappy (an in other news not engaged) employees are costing Global Economy 1 trillion dollars a year!

According to a study done by Gallup worldwide employee engagement is only 15% and believe it or not it is just getting worst:

Global productivity growth is in decline. GDP per capita — or productivity — is a key metric in global economics. It is the starting point for measuring almost everything having to do with economic growth and human development. When the world’s productivity is in decline, so is the availability of good jobs with a living wage. Poor productivity stunts societal and economic growth.

Source: Gallup

But the good news is, it can be fixed!

What if we don’t do anything about the unhappy folks?

So, at this point you might think: “Well, you know what? I’m fine with having those unhappy employees, and will pay that price”.

Based on the same study by Gallup, globally 25% of employees are disengaged and they would deliberately harm the company both financially and culturally and are effectively hostile to your team!

As Dr Micheal Pizer says:

Emotions are contagious and an unhappy worker might bring everyone else down.

And it is not just that. With unhappy employees there is a potential for sabotage.

Based on a study from SANS (Protecting against inside attack) it is much harder to detect hacks when it is happening from inside!

As you can see, it’s not as simple as, leaving the unhappy people alone. We have to fix it!

Why are they unhappy?

Of course there are several reasons for folks being unhappy, and some of those reasons might have actually nothing to do with their workplace, and so obviously you will not have control over those reasons.

But there are some contributors in there workplace and there are the top ones:

Their Boss, and their Motivation and Purpose.

1. A boss with “no empathy” and “no perspective”

These are the 2 things that great leaders need to have

Leader are so concerned about their own position, that they often forget that, they are not there to be “in charge”, they are there to take care of people in their charge!

Listen to Simon Sinek and his speech about, some of the characteristics of a true leader:

At the end of the day, leaders are not responsible for the job. They are responsible for the people who are responsible for the job.

2. No Motivation

People get motivated with different things, and it is not that simple to motivate people, just because everyone is different. It is a leader’s responsibility to know their team, and then figure out how each one of their team member will be motivated. then put some processes in place to pump your people.

Some people get motivated by learning, some with development, some recognition, some with regular feedback, some with 1 on 1 coaching, some with a cup of coffee, T-Shirt, a post card, etc.

3. No Purpose

People should find their “WHY”. As a company we need to help everyone to find out WHY they are doing WHAT they are doing. Without knowing WHY we get up and go to work every single day, after some time we would lose purpose and ultimately be unhappy.

Again I invite you to listen to this amazing video by Simon Sinek About “WHY”:

Some approaches to improve our team’s happiness

So far we have looked at some of the reasons that could potentially make people unhappy in our teams. Now how do we make them happy? Just do the things mentioned above.

Being a great leader is not about “getting shit done”, Great leaders , Motivate people and make sure people find their Purpose.

Great Leaders:

It is interesting when we hire someone for a technical job, say as a Developer, we send them training and they work hard to learn things that they need to do their job, and they work hard, and because of that, we promote them to be “the leader”, and with no training everyone just expects them to be as good as before! with no training, we just expect them to know what to do! Anyways, we should just make sure that we know that nowadays, Leadership is a science and you can learn!

When you are dealing with the dealers in your team, there are some signs that you can look at to see which one of your leaders, are potentially contributing to having unhappy employees. Here are some of them:

A good leader communicates with their team on a regular basis. And their team feel comfortable to discuss their issues and feeling with their leader without hesitation. A good leader would encourage you to push and challenge yourself and do more than what is in your comfort zone and beyond what you do on a daily basis. A good leader would inspire you by introducing you to the right people who you can learn from them, or their journey might inspire you. A good leader would like to develop your skills, so constantly asking you what you are learning, or proposes to you to “go check out this cool new thing” A good leader recognizes your efforts, success and accomplishments, in front of others and gives you all the credit that you deserve. A good leader has empathy. If your results are down and they see that you are struggling, they would start with empathy and would ask you, they have noticed your decline in productivity, and they would ask you how you are doing, and would try to help you, and you would not be threatened to be fired, as that would very little and would will any motivation that might have been left in you!

Motivating employees through purpose

KPMG did a case study about motivating employees through purpose:

As a result, we know that: