Ever growing interest in HAPq

This was published in M&IT magazine in July 09

Poisson Rouge MD Mark Katz wants to lift the lid on British businesses and find out how happy their employees are. Belinda Cole finds out why

Happiness is the key to a successful workforce – so says Mark Katz, MD of Camden-based teambuilding and motivation company Poisson Rouge. He’s so evangelical about it that he’s spent three years and £100k developing an online tool to measure corporate happiness in partnership with fellow director and behavioural psychologist Raminder Braich.

HAPq (which stands for happiness quotient) is a ten-minute survey which staff can complete anonymously online. "It basically ascertains whether you are happy at work. Do you like your
colleagues? Are you stressed? Are you able to fight back in a recession?

Companies that score highly will have better staff retention, higher profitability and better customer satisfaction.

"Now, more than ever, we need to know how happy our employees are and what we can do
about it if they’re unhappy." HAPq launched in March and has already been completed by 1,000
employees. Katz is aiming to get all the FTSE 500 companies on board in order to measure the average happiness quotient of UK PLC.

"We’ve had some of the largest companies in the world use it," says Katz. "And we’ve had a proactive approach from a high net worth individual who wants to fund it.

HAPq is the biggest thing that has happenend to us and I think we are about to go ballistic with it!

Interest in the tool has not been restricted to Britain, he says. "It’s just gone live in Italy and we hope to have it in the States by the end of the year." Katz hopes it will remind companies
of the importance of motivational and team-building activities, yet another casualty of the recession. "The budget for team-building events has gone down by 70 per cent and the decisionmaking has become a lot more kneejerk. Lots of people are trying to bring
it in-house and we’re begging themnot to. The worst thing is to take your team away and do it badly."

The nature of the motivational activities has changed too, with people afraid of public perception.
"The big danger is that fun is off the agenda and that’s a big mistake," says Katz. "No fun equals no engagement and no results and people will leave.

It's what creates the difference between successful companies and others. Just look at Innocent or Virgin – in these companies you can see it, smell it, taste it... for the record these companies are perceived as among the happiest in the UK in the HAPq survey to date."

He adds: "A financial services company we work with was going to give away a little magic trick on their exhibition stand recently but they pulled it because they were terrified the industry would regard them as frivolous, yet our best give away ever was a chocolate bar which said ‘we
don’t talk bollocks’ on the wrapper. On the underside it said: ‘when you’ve finished binning the brochures you have collected from this trade fair, put your feet up, have a cup of tea and
look at our website’. It cost a fraction of a brochure and it won us some substantial business, including BP."

Prior to the banking crash, 65 percent of Poisson Rouge’s business of Poisson Rouge’s business
came from banks and big city law firms. Now the bulk is public sector, retail and pharmaceutical, and average spend has been halved from £200-250 per head to £100-150.

"To adapt to the current climate we've created a number of activities that can go out for very little money. We can do team-building for 30 for £1,000 - we don’t like to, but we can," reveals Katz. That way the client still gets to motivate their team and it keeps the accounts department
happy.