

Measuring Happiness Helped Us Build A Better Team - Piotr_F
http://desmart.com/blog/how-measuring-happiness-helped-us-build-a-better-team

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hedgew
When drawn publicly, those little smileys are influenced by workplace
politics, complex signaling, and the influence of other people's smileys. I'd
be very surprised if they ever reflect anyone's actual mood.

You could probably achieve the same claimed results by reframing the question
as "how did your work go today?".

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kfk
For me the fact that I should be happy would be very stressful

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wlucjan
It's surprising that the general assumption is that it was manager's idea. It
was actually idea of regular team member, who noticed a situation of tension
between team members and wondered how to get these tensions out to the light
and resolve them peacefully. It was put to a try and team had all rights to
drop it if they found it brings no useful information. Yet they kept it
further.

Nobody feels the pressure to feel happy - so-so and unhappy faces are common
(btw Luc = myself and nobody here thinks about firing me for speaking out the
truth). Everybody simply states his real mood and a reasons for it - ie. stuck
with some problem for 3rd day with no feel of progress, having too many
meetings on particular day, having some personal reasons, whatever. If it is
in power of team to help with issue, it has been brought to the light and
something can be done about it. That's all it is about - token for raising a
discussion - not a thing to show off how happy team we are.

Having it has not made our daily scrums any longer, yet we are able to start a
day with better understanding of what is happening around us in the team and
project and yet another opportunity to spot issues and deal with these
together supporting each other (and on each retrospective team support is one
of the strongest voted "winds in the sails").

I'd like also to thank Ben (brudgers). What he has wrote in his comments has
the grasped the notion behind the idea and its implementation in DeSmart.

~~~
jonsterling
If I share with somebody that I have an issue about something, I want to be
sure that people will not conflate my legitimate complaint with my "mood".

It's a really nice way to gas-light folks into submission: "The team has
noticed that your mood has been pretty poor the last few weeks; is there
anything we can do to lift your spirits? We're worried that your mood is
affecting your work." <\---- utterly horrifying

Now, I can't say what's going on in your team, and probably at the moment, all
is well and nobody is feeling victimized by this. But consider the fact that
by binding up two (properly) separate concepts (reporting of blockers, etc.
vs. poor emotional state, which is a PRIVATE matter), you will be ruling out a
lot of potential employees in the future. Your team could decide to change the
policy as they please, but if I came in for an interview and heard about this,
I'd run as far as I could.

EDIT: I have worked with people who suffer from depression and mental illness.
I cannot imagine how stressful a work environment like this would be for some
of these folks. I've been working at startups for years, and I have a thick
skin—I can "deal with" the high pressure and culturally necessitated
amalgamation of one's personal and professional life (even if I hate it), but
there are a lot of really skilled workers for whom this is incredibly
destructive.

~~~
wlucjan
People in my team tend to express their mood in project context. Yet they find
it valuable to know somebody has a bad day, so to not take his mood as
something their actions had created.

It has not raised anybodies anxiety or made them feel exhibitioning private
matters they would like not to share. It also makes them feel comfortable they
can express themselves in an open way.

It may not work with all teams and all environments - yet my feeling is that
such environments and teams have other stuff to work out to build space for
comfortable exchange of opinions and feelings.

There are many guides for effective feedback which base on expressing how
actions or behaviour of a person you give feedback to impact feelings. So I
guess it's worth exercising ;)

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brudgers
I don't think I've ever remarked on "all the other comments" before,
but...Yes, tracking smilies and frownies will suck for the same reasons
everything sucks in workplaces with management by all-vacations-are-cancelled-
until-moral-improves. The author isn't saying it will turn all Cobra Kai's
little John Kreeses into Mr. Miyagis. The suggestion is that it may work for
well functioning teams where functioning is largely or wholly defined in
relation to teamwork.

~~~
jeremiep
If your team is already well functioning with good teamwork, you already got
the communication to make such a smiley board useless.

~~~
brudgers
No team is perfect and even great people on great teams are frustrated
sometimes. What gets optimized is what is measured.

~~~
jeremiep
I agree with you, which is why I prefer to communicate these issues in full
context rather than put smilies on a board and lose said context.

I can barely remember what I did the previous day in the morning scrums unless
I worked on one specific thing only, I can also have many happy, so-so and
frustrated moments every day.

This is why I feel such a board to be useless. You can't easily gamify or fake
authenticity in face-to-face conversations.

~~~
brudgers
How does your team aggregate, share and present all the conversations about
mood during its retrospectives?

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jeremiep
We run about 20+ parallel projects in the company, with teams ranging from
6-10 to 40+. Retrospectives are a terrible way to share information in such a
context as teams get formed and changed all the time. I frequently spend time
helping 3-4 projects every week on top of my assigned project.

We simply don't wait until the end of a project to fix problems, there's often
too much at stake. Just like we don't wait the next day's scrum to fix an
issue - we use scrums to make sure everyone is on the same page. We instead
have monthly all-company short presentations by teams wanting to show their
results during lunch time as well as more focused monthly presentations on
company time.

It's not perfect, but I'm pretty sure it beats months of smiley faces. What
does it even mean to aggregate smiley faces? I fail to see the value of saying
"we were happy 75% of the time during the last project" without understanding
why.

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corysama
Yes, aggregating mood for a whole project then looking back afterwards and
saying "yep, that was the data" would be pretty useless for getting that
product shipped. But, that's not what's being claimed. The claim is that the
smiley calendar is a tool that helps everyone spot some problems and trends.
This is in addition to having a few managers keep in-practice private (and
probably mental) logs of everyone's mood over hundreds of face-to-face check-
ins.

The value I see in this is that people sometimes totally do fake their mood
face to face for a variety of reasons. People sometimes will also totally fake
being overly happy on a board too. It's just one more opportunity for people
to bring problems to the surface. It'll work better for some people than
others, better for some teams than others. But, when it works it would be
tremendously valuable.

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saiya-jin
my idea out of blue sunny sky - do once a week an anonymous doodle/whatever
app with things that went good, things that went wrong, what i would like to
change, and suggestions to team building event (it could be anything from an
hour team meeting about technologies/changes to few beers at the bar to
anything else... and not necessarily on weekly basis).

unless the team is massive, it cannot be really 100% anonymous, but good
enough is... good enough. and make clear in the beginning that these data have
single purpose, and nothing else.

then there is the reality part - big multinational corps (i work in one of
them) don't care about this - you should be super happy ultra motivated
employee by default, all the time, beacon of light, among all other beacons of
light. You are not happy, you complain? well guess what, in next firing round,
the chances of you being gone are higher, much higher...

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yarper
I'm sure there's some startup that lets people enter this anonymously and the
results are aggregated

I'd always put happy face then quit. The social pressure to put happy faces
must be immense. Also being English I suspect the sarcastic smiley would be a
recurring feature if implemented here.

~~~
yarper
As a follow up if there are some cultural differences - whenever someone asks
how you are here, you always say "not bad" or "fine" (even if you're on fire).

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dev360
We used sprint retrospectives to vent and improve every aspect of the work
environment. Sometimes there were uncomfortable criticism but the team bought
into it and we all agreed we made progress.

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kylered
we measured this at our last startup anonymously; seems there is some research
behind it. we didn't have enough data points to really gather much meaning out
of it though.

[http://www.aamga.org/files/hr/MetaAnalysis_Q12_WhitePaper_20...](http://www.aamga.org/files/hr/MetaAnalysis_Q12_WhitePaper_2009.pdf)

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s3nnyy
Somebody should totally build this. Maybe integrate it in slack and keep it
anonymous to avoid social pressure.

~~~
brudgers
Teams aren't built on anonymity. Good teams combine accountability and trust.
Anonymity only matters in the absence of trust...it matters when co-workers
and managers are in the habit of kicking each other while they are down...and
in that case all that honest reporting would show is smilies from the bullies
and frownies from everybody upon who they impose misery.

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mattmanser
Luc quite obviously isn't happy by the way, are you going to fire him soon?

Also, what is it with software developers that they allow themselves to get
treated like children?

First we had to stand up every day and report what we did yesterday, you
little child who we can't trust to work so we will micro-manage you.

Now you want us to put a smiley on a board every day like a pre-schooler so we
can know when you're becoming a problem. Thank you, little software developer.

~~~
codeonfire
At most companies, the only way managers know how to lead is what they learned
with their children at home. They go into the workplace and just do what has
worked for them before. They are the parent and the employee is the child.
It's so simple! Of course employees are insulted and quit. If you look at any
tech company, all employee facing HR material will be made like a cartoon with
upbeat kids music with lots of clapping and whistling.

~~~
enraged_camel
The parent-child analogy is spot on. It's also why managers see themselves as
the authority figure and get annoyed when people don't do as they say. Whereas
most employees (especially in high-tech jobs) expect their manager to be a
mentor/guide, rather than a "boss". This disconnect tends to cause a lot of
friction.

~~~
bsder
> Whereas most employees (especially in high-tech jobs) expect their manager
> to be a mentor/guide, rather than a "boss".

Actually, I would argue that most _employees_ don't know what they want their
manager to be. If they did, they would remember that and be better managers
later.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Actually, I would argue that most employees don't know what they want their
> manager to be. If they did, they would remember that and be better managers
> later.

I don't think that's true. I think most managers, however, when they become
managers, learn what _their_ managers expect them to be, which may not be what
their employees want them to be.

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jonsterling
This sounds downright dehumanizing. fuck

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Shengbo
Rosz just doesn't give a shit.

