As a child, I was told “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”. Now with the launch of the Happiness Index, it looks like there is a new axiom, “Happiness every day keeps the competition away.”

Earlier this month, Dubai launched an initiative to measure the public’s satisfaction with government services. The “happiness index” will send data collected daily from all departments to a central online domain that will monitor the index and send daily reports to top decision-makers on customer service satisfaction.

His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, said: “Waiting for the reports of public satisfaction with government services on an annual or quarterly basis does not meet our ambitions, because the world today is changing rapidly and people’s expectations are also changing rapidly and must be monitored on a daily basis.”

There are numerous thoughts on happiness in business, with Stanford University offering a happiness class to future business leaders and CEOs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos espousing make happiness your business model. I am far more interested in the frequency of monitoring — daily.

When I heard about the daily monitoring of the Happiness Index, it immediately made me wonder, “What if leaders monitored performance daily in a similarly systematic way? Would they too become more competitive?”

Daily performance monitoring would outstrip happiness in its competitiveness impact, but it may not receive the same positive press given that happiness feels like an apple a day and performance would read like a doctor’s visit.

Shaikh Mohammad is correct in that waiting on annual or quarterly reports is just too long. How do you recover and make timely improvements with scarce insights?

Just the night before the launch of this daily “happiness” monitoring, I was having dinner with a client who had strong third-quarter results. But when I probed whether this will make a great year, he said, “No, we won’t be able to recover from missing the first quarter”.

They missed their revenue projection in the first quarter and have been struggling ever since to make up, even after having an above forecasted third quarter. Unfortunately for their bonuses, they won’t make it.

Programming for soft results

What would have happened if they monitored performance daily? Would they be getting bonuses at the end of the year? I am an enormous fan of frequent, yet informal, monitoring to help your team succeed. Slackness in monitoring is softness in results.

The idea of frequent monitoring continues to raise concerns by both leaders and followers alike. Leaders complain their teams will not like it. And followers don’t desire the inspection. The purpose of daily monitoring of performance is improvement.

This is not a “gotcha” activity designed to catch employees out for doing poorly. If my boss, if I had one, were out to “get” me, I wouldn’t like it either. But if he were working to help me succeed, make sure I was on target, that would be a different story. It is a mechanism to keep improving.

Based on the daily reports from the Happiness Index, top officials will monitor the happiest and most content locations and government departments. Why? To develop services and improve the public’s satisfaction and happiness with the services offered.

Development and improvement of services should be a daily activity. It is not something that needs to be delayed or waited until a future “formal” review point. With technology improvements that send diagnostic data to the manufacture and continual updates, we are becoming conditioned for immediacy in improvements that take place in the background of our lives.

For Dubai, its impact on people’s happiness is real, and for you its impact on your customers can also be real.

Now, you need to condition your workforce to be a fan of continual monitoring. While the happiness index is a first of its kind, as a leader, the brilliance lies in its daily monitoring and drive to improve the public’s experience.

Actually, the new axiom should be, “Monitoring everyday keeps the competition away””

Dr Tommy Weir is a leadership adviser and author of ‘10 Tips for Leading in the Middle East’ and other leadership writings. Follow him on Twitter: @tommyweir.