HeartBeat – Checking Our Pulse

About 8 months ago, the software engineering department at Enova created a "Culture Guild" to examine and improve departmental culture. The Guild's first step was creating a value set focused on:

• Craftsmanship
• Community
• Communication and awareness
• Balanced pragmatism
• Shared ownership

To measure how well they were living these values, they developed a tool called HeartBeat - a weekly survey where employees rate their experience on a 4-point scale.

Evolution of HeartBeat

Initially, the survey asked about their original values, but the results were consistently averaging around 3.3. The Guild realized they wanted to understand employee happiness more directly, so they modified the survey to ask about:

• Happiness
• Empathy
• Trust
• Focus
• Community

Key Insights

Key insights from the HeartBeat survey included:

• Happiness and focus are closely correlated
• Community and empathy are tightly connected

The team began using these insights in practical ways:

• Managers started discussing focus in one-on-one meetings
• Introduced events to help team members get to know each other better

Future Plans

Future plans for HeartBeat include:

• Adding team/project tags
• Creating a data dashboard
• Tracking happiness related to specific events
• Building user profiles to track personal HeartBeat history