
Tracking Joy at Work - begriffs
http://begriffs.com/posts/2015-03-15-tracking-joy-at-work.html
======
cle
"You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and what better to measure than an
activity that consumes your waking life. Work."

Does anyone else think the phrase "you can't improve what you can't measure"
is nonsense? I think that most improvements are qualitative and inherently
unmeasurable.

I'm not downplaying the importance of measuring, but we have to be careful
when trying to reduce qualitative changes down to metrics. Too many times I've
seen businesses or teams try to measure qualitative changes, and then spend so
much time optimizing for their metrics that they qualitatively regress.
Measurements are not magic bullets that remove the need for good intuition.

~~~
danieljeff
He is referencing a famous quote often attributed to W. Edwards Deming. He
actually never said it.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming)

I've seen it attributed to Peter Drucker as well.

I think the general notion that it is more difficult to improve things that
you can't/don't measure is fairly accurate.

~~~
jdmichal
> I think the general notion that it is more difficult to improve things that
> you can't/don't measure is fairly accurate.

To be somewhat pedantic:

The difficulty of improving a thing does not change based on you measuring it.
If I, say, measure the response time of a service, it's still just as
difficult as it was before to improve the response time of the service.
Furthermore, any improvement you do make will not change based on you
measuring it. If I do improve the response time of the service, it will be
just as improved whether or not I measure the change.

So, measuring does nothing but allow you to quantify the improvement you have
made. It doesn't make improving a thing easier, and it doesn't make
improvements better.

That said, there's plenty of scenarios where impartial measurements are
critical. If you don't know what to improve, broad measurement across the
entire system can provide an answer. If there's indecisiveness about which
action will provide the _best_ improvement, then impartial measuring will
provide an answer. If you don't trust your perception, or cannot perceive the
result, then impartial measuring can also provide an answer.

~~~
strttn
Taking measurements will usually prompt questions of "how do I change the
results over time?" So, although the difficulty of improving the thing doesn't
change; the chance of taking action to improve the thing does change for the
better.

Measurements will usually encourage attention and effort to change in a way
that non-measured things are unlikely to.

On that basis, I'd argue that even things that are very difficult to measure
quantitatively would benefit if a suitable proxy was found that could be
measured.

Of course, you do have to be careful that your proxy is suitable!

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harterrt
I did something similar for myself based on TagTime [1] from the same folks
who made beeminder.

I'd suggest not enforcing a minimum spacing between samplings. The minimum
spacing tends to push samplings towards the ends and center of the day. It
also gives the randomness memory. I noticed when I was sampling myself, my
behavior would subtly change after a sampling when I knew I wouldn't be
sampled for a little while. Although, I don't think this would cause a
meaningful problem in your context.

Thanks for the writeup! Very interesting.

~~~
dreeves
Thanks for pointing this out! In addition to not wanting a minimum, it's also
bad to fix the number of samples. Then you know that the more you get sampled
the less likely additional samples are. Might not matter for some applications
but, as you say, it can subtly affect your behavior.

The right way to do the sampling is as a Poisson process, ie, where the gaps
between samples are drawn from an exponential distribution. Details:
[http://tagti.me](http://tagti.me)

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orlandopoli
Back in 2012 we were also curious about that topic and developed a service
called CompanyMood ([https://www.company-mood.com](https://www.company-
mood.com))

It tracks the mood of invited employees on a weekly basis.

We thought, instead of asking for specific feelings it would be more intuitive
to estimate the mood from 0(lowest) to 100.

Furthermore you can organize your team/company in departments, use an
anonymous complaint/suggestion box and get an overview via a dashboard that
shows all metrics in a graphical overview.

~~~
andrea_sdl
Another tool on the same topic is
[http://www.nikoniko.co/](http://www.nikoniko.co/)

I'm a big believer of tracking mood, although it must be very easy to
integrate into the daily workflow.

How did your project evolved?

~~~
orlandopoli
It evolved (and still does^^) very well.

With almost no paid advertising, more than 100 companies use CompanyMood
(mostly in Germany over [https://www.company-mood.de](https://www.company-
mood.de))

We have lots of new features (and Apps) in the pipeline and we're currently
working on making a business out of it.

~~~
andrea_sdl
Sounds good! I also added the mood tracking to my personal time tracker (
Haptime.in ) .

I think the ability to determine the overall mood status and understand the
correlation between projects and work will be a key to improve the employer
AND employee AND client happiness.

It's nice to see I'm not alone :) keep going with the work ;)

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wozmirek
Sort of reminds me of what we've done at my first work:
[http://blog.lunarlogic.io/2013/measurable-
happiness/](http://blog.lunarlogic.io/2013/measurable-happiness/) ;)

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bscofield
This is great! I love to see people exploring mood tracking and looking for
correlations and insights. I hope you write more about what this helps you
discover.

<shameless plug> I built Moodprint
([http://moodprint.com](http://moodprint.com)) to do the same sort of thing.
It's using random sampling as well, though it's personal as opposed to team-
based, and it allows free-form mood entry. Some people have been using it for
>6 months, and it's helped find patterns around work and relationships, for
instance.

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hammock
Interesting, see this blog from NYT two days ago:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/business/dealbook/when-
emp...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/business/dealbook/when-employee-
engagement-turns-into-employee-
burnout.html?mabReward=R6&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=0)

"What companies really need to measure is not how engaged their employees are,
but rather how consistently energized they feel."

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nickpo
While this comment does not offer a tracking mechanism or a tool, I do believe
you can measure and feel when an environment gets better. More subjective than
most would like...but you can definitely observe a difference in behaviors.

The UN also thought that this was important. There are more details at
liveHappy.com and #HappyActs. There is an upcoming International Happiness Day
on March 20th.

In our office we are celebrating the day with everything from team walks,
Jenga competitions, popcorn, and managers serving the employees ice cream, as
well as building a Happiness Wall.

I can tell you over a year of diligently addressing team morale...it is
nothing Big Bang it is consistent small steps and paying attention to the
employees and their needs.

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jdmichal
I wonder: Do you derive value from the use of a 1-5 scale? Do you have set
definitions for each level, or is that left up to the responder?

I have a certain curiosity sometimes about the use of 1-5 or 1-10 scales,
where it seems like a simple boolean response could be appropriate. In this
context, I could see an interesting experiment in simply asking, as a yes/no
question, "Are you content?"

~~~
jeffwass
why not take a poll :

On a scale from 1 to 5, how much value do you derive from the use of a 1 to 5
scale?

True or False - it's OK to limit subjective questions to Boolean responses.

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squirrel
At Osper we use an electronic Niko Niko[1] board to track daily mood. I find
it helpful for uncovering issues in the company early though of course it
isn't the only source.

[1] [http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-
mood...](http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood-with-a-
niko-niko-calendar/)

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zenogais
This is basically the idea of the algedonic meter that was set to be part of
Chile's project Cybersyn in the 1970s [1] before a military coup overthrew the
Allende government.

[1]: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-
machin...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine)

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simonebrunozzi
Linden Labs, the company that built Second Life, used to have a "Love
machine", used to "give" love points to other co-workers (as a result of a
good interaction or contribution).

I found that concept extremely fascinating.

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sblawrie
Did you use any libraries for the dashboard? I'd be interested in setting
something like this up at my company, too.

~~~
begriffs
Yeah, it's mostly just open source software inside. Grafana for the charting
which gets its data from InfluxDB. The happiness bot is broken into three
haskell programs, a scheduler, a soliciter, and a server which listens for
slack responses.

The services are wired together with
[https://github.com/begriffs/microservice-
template](https://github.com/begriffs/microservice-template)

Send me an email if you want help setting things up. joe@begriffs.com

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partition
Hawthorne effect: "Feels good to track mood."

