“Some people believe that happiness is something they will achieve when they are famous or successful, or when they get enough money. But research tells us that happiness is more a decision than a destination. And it is something that you can simply decide to achieve in the workplace as well.“ by Jurgen Appelo – Managing for Happiness.
This Management 3.0 practice addresses team collaboration, employee engagement, and open and honest feedback. The Happiness Door usually consists of post-it notes with feedback written on them. Through the happiness index, it assumes that people can act as the best gauge of their own happiness levels.
Happiness Door should allow people to provide a quick feedback, after a presentation, training session, business meeting, or any other social interaction. Participants must understand the happiness index scale used on the Happiness Door. You can use numbers from 1-5 for your scale, or a drawing using weather indicators, or emojis, among other formats that come with your creativity.
All comments shared on Happiness Door are anonymous but made public. Put it in an easily accessible place for everyone to observe and read, encouraging them to share comments. For more information about this practice, you can consult this link: https://management30.com/practice/happiness-door/
Why did I decide to put into practice?
I believe that happiness is part of a sense of belonging and purpose, and I am not alone in this. A study conducted by Andrew Oswald, Eugenio Proto, and Daniel Sgroi at Warwick university, Journal of Labor Economics in 2014, found that happier employees have an average of 12% increase in their productivity. Shawn Achor, author of the best-seller Big Potential, The Happiness Advantage e Before Happiness, in his article, comments that a decade of research proves that happiness increases almost all commercial and educational results: increasing sales by 37%, productivity by 31%, and accuracy in tasks by 19%, as well as a myriad of improvements in health and quality of life.
In Brazil, only 27% of Brazilians are engaged in work, according to the Gallup consultancy and more than 33 million suffer from burnout, according to the International Stress Management Association (Isma-BR). Data that is ignored and not so relevant to certain companies, passing unnoticed.
As expected, the idea of happiness in the people who make up the teams is rarely considered. My purpose here is to strongly consider the issue of happiness with the team.
In the guideline, we conclude the ceremonies (daily, retrospectives, reviews, etc.), meetings, feedback, among others, with the majority saying: “bye–bye”, “good morning to all”, “see you soon”, “I speak with you later … ”,“ Ok, see you soon”, or even, on the remote, hang up the phone without saying anything. I started to have a certain curiosity in knowing what feelings these people have after such events. 🙄
How did I perform this practice?
I will make an initial summary of the proposal of this practice:
- At the end of the Daily meeting, which starts at 9 am, we measure the level of happiness, in an approximate period of two weeks, which represents our Sprint.
- In the Retrospective, we will use the Happiness Radar to observe how our emotional journey was. With the result of Happiness Radar, we will go on with the Moving Motivators exercise. This way, we observe and add relevant topics related to this topic.
- At the end of the Retrospective, we will use the Happiness Door to capture the feedback on all those dynamics.
Now let’s go to the details of all the steps:
First Stage: Opening and welcoming the team (this happened at the beginning of our Sprint)
I made a presentation on the topic of Happiness and what benefits this dynamic of Management 3.0 could bring to the team. It was a good 20 minutes chat. The point was well accepted and everyone gave their consent to move on.
Next, I present our connection of happiness and how we relate it to a figure of speech with the theme: Climate/Weather, being as follows:
Happiness Radar – Open and honest engagement and feedback 😁
Question: How is your “CLIMATE/WEATHER” after our Daily meeting today?
Sunny day, I am very happy today! (Happiness)
The weather forecast today is Sun with Clouds, it is cloudy, there will be no beach but I will take a good walk. (Neutral)
Rain all day today! Upset, he ruined my plans for this weekend. (Dissatisfied)
This way, we define our measurement. Now we are going to start when we are going to do this collection.
Second Stage: A quick collection of your emotion 🥳😭😍😫😐
This was a challenge that we would encounter in our practice:
- How to quickly collect feedback from 14 people?
- At what point will we collect the level of happiness?
We performed our Daily meetings remotely using Microsoft Teams, which is a unified platform for communication and collaboration. I found that init, there is a feature that you can add a poll to your Teams room.
Ready!!! Problem solved, we were able to instantly capture the level of happiness at the end of the Daily meeting, where everyone is gathered, and using the Teams poll. Next, the Teams image.
This tool gives you an option to export the results to Excel. Also, there is an option where you can put the person who voted anonymous as anonymous. In our case, we use this resource.
The level of happiness was not measured according to the result of our Daily meeting. We agreed that it should be measured through some situation from the previous or current day, from work or personal life, or even the final result of our Daily meeting. So at the end, it was up to each one.
Third Stage: Time to Collect and Analyze Results
With each passing day, the volume of information increased and, in this way, I was able to visualize and perceive the movement of the team’s happiness level. I agreed with the team that I would not be presenting the result partially. Instead I would be presenting the final consolidated result only in our Retrospective, at the end of 2 weeks.
Fourth Stage: The Retrospective
Anyway, the time has come for our Retrospective.
Our team has 12 members and everyone was invited to participate in the dynamic. On the day of exercise, 10 members were able to participate. They were one PRO, one Scrum Master, and eigth Developers participating.
Total time: 1:30h
The Retrospective was carried out with the use of Moving Motivator. You can read in detail in another post, I wrote, here. In this post, I’m not going into detail about the way I ran Moving Motivator.
To begin with, each team member prioritized their intrinsic motivators: Curiosity, Honor, Acceptance, Mastery, Strength, Freedom, Relationships, Order, Objective, Status. Time-box: 15 minutes.
Then, I presented the final result of our Happiness Radar to everyone. With its metrics extracted from the poll, we carry out at each Daily meeting. We talked, exchanged many ideas, and remembered the events that happened during that period of time. You can see this in the image below. Time-box: 10 minutes.
Fifth Stage: Conclusion of our Retrospective
We completed our Moving Motivators and consequently our Retrospective. So, to end our Retrospective, I asked each participant to post one or more comments on our Happiness Door, as follows:
- What was good: in this scenario, I asked the team to put up the post-its that made them happy throughout this iteration.
- What can improve: In this scenario, I asked the team to put up post-its of things that can improve.
- This was not good: in this scenario, I asked the team to put up the post-its that made them sad throughout this iteration.
Again I made sure that it was anonymous and that they were sincere, yet subtle. Time-box: 5 minutes.
It generated several insights, ideas, and complements. We were able to read them all, it was fun and we practiced the team’s energy a lot. Time-box: 10 minutes.
The major advantage of Happiness Door over other traditional methods is that the feedback is received immediately and allows decisions to be made according to the situation. Look at the results below !!! 😄
My learnings as a facilitator
As the experience of other dynamics, it is very important to send the content of the subject so that everyone can reach a good level of knowledge. I know that not everyone will read, but you can always decrease the time for initial explanations.
As for Happiness Door, I found it a very simple practice to be implemented and has quick a return, so you can use it in PI Planning*, retrospectives, workshops, training, etc.
In specific Happiness Radar, performing this dynamic before PI Planning, in a retrospective, helped me to solve some issues of empathy and teamwork for the next PI Planning. Very cool, right? You start to see the results!
Some variations that we can try:
- You can use Happiness Radar for an entire project.
- Next time I’ll try using the 12 Steps of Happiness with Happiness Door.
- The variation with the Moving Motivator worked very well. We can observe what it may or may not affect our motivations.
Sometimes I could have done differently was to share the Happiness Radar result daily. Because the team could notice some internal dysfunction sooner and solve them. If you are going to use it on a big project, as I mentioned above, it is interesting to make it public for the team. I have not yet had the opportunity to apply it in person at work.
I like the anonymity that these tools allowed, Happiness Radar and Door because they make people sincere and prevent information from being tracked. It was up to each one to choose to state their comment. The team was so comfortable that everyone was already commenting on its post-it. The synonym for this is that you will create a safe environment. 😉
With Happiness Door you understand the feeling of the team, you can identify whether the team has assimilated the content of the ceremony. A team that is upset and full of problems, perhaps, will not correctly assimilate what went wrong at the meeting, for example. One suggestion is to increase the scale of happiness by including two more levels: cloudy with rain and cloud with snow.
As the Miro is a easy to use and simple tool, perhaps, for Happiness Door I should have used a more creative, colorful board with more images.
If you want to become more familiar with this subject, I suggest some sites:
- https://www.funretrospectives.com/happiness-radar/
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/getting-roi-out-happiness-wall-ralph-van-roosmalen/
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-build-sustainable-events-using-direct-feedback-door-van-veghel/
In my opinion, what I planted here was just a small seed, as I believe that to achieve happiness at work, the company must act on this seed. An environment has to be created to receive happiness and, on the other hand, people have to do their part to make everything work.
* PI Planning: Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision. PI planning is essential to SAFe: If you are not doing it, you are not doing SAFe.
Also read the Portugueses version
Blog do Carlos Giani 
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