Monday, July 9, 2012

Is Your Team Happy?


Studies have proven that happiness is the key to success and longevity.  Many companies will use incentives or rewards as a means to increase productivity but there are challenges to keeping employee’s motivated for a consistent period of time.  Employers can only do so much to keep their people happy, people need to figure out how to make themselves happy.  How awesome would it be to start tracking the happiness of your employees to increase productivity in the workplace?
The key to measuring happiness is through continuous iterative cycles of inspection and honest feedback from employees.  I attended Jeff Sutherland’s latest webinar on the ‘Happiness Metric’ and I wanted to share some of the ways you can measure the happiness of your employees. The simplest way is to ask them using a short survey of questions and quantify the results.  Each culture is different so you may adjust the questions a couple of times before you can make correlations to the P&L.  Here is a sample set Jeff’s COO suggested I use on my last project.  I administered this exact survey to 5 different feature teams (6 members each), keep reading…
Number 1 and 2 are the only questions quantified for the metric:
  1. On a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being extremely happy) How happy are you feeling about your role? (Indicate Role)
  2. On a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being extremely happy) how happy are you feeling about the company overall?
  3. What were the leading factors that increased your happiness since the last survey? (Give example)
  4. What factors reduced your happiness since the last survey? (Give example)
  5. Do you feel like you understand the product vision? (Team)
  6. What is the one thing the team could do differently next sprint that would most increase your happiness? (Improvements)
Discipline is another key ingredient to creating hyper-productive teams.  Having your employees tell you how they feel and then doing nothing about it is counter-productive.  So here is the warning label for this article: WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT WORK IF YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS ENOUGH TO IMPLEMENT CHANGE.
We will use metric again here at Seven Tablets and reformat it to suit the whole company, not just the product development teams.   The culture at our company is all about success through creativity and happiness.  Keep posted on my blogs and I will share the results in a couple months including  how to get everyone to adopt the survey.

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