Measuring Happiness Helped Us Build A Better Team | Hacker News Reader

Measuring Happiness Helped Us Build A Better Team

desmart.com

30 pointsPiotr_F35 comments

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?".

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

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Like most useful metrics, the chart can show trends that correlate with other documented time series metrics. These can be reviewed periodically at regular intervals. Retrospectives can be held whenever it helps the team, e.g. at the end of each sprint/iteration cycle rather than only at the end of a project or major milestone. YMMV, and agile is all about what works for a particular team.

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...

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.

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).

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.

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...

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

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.

My current team uses nikoniko.co with everyone's name set to anonymous. It's not perfectly anonymous but close enough to not influence responses.

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.

It will most likely end up being gamified just like most Agile metrics. The sticker board already ignores the context completely, so you can't look at it and know why they were happy or unhappy, therefore making it yet another form of coconut headphones.

Funny how the original Manifesto for Agile Software Development mentions individuals and interactions over processes and tools, yet we resort to the later to manage the former constantly. I would think by now the irony would at least be obvious.

Also, we're one of the few industries where our managers don't have the expertise of those they do manage. So its no wonder they try kindergarten management techniques.

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.

This is partly a side effect of the, at this point, long-running trend of employers not training people on anything, let alone proper management.

I've had some awful managers in my career. One was formerly an elementary school teacher. She, very predictably, treated everyone like they were in elementary school, going so far as to give people gold stars for things. When called out on it, she confessed she really had no idea how to manage adults.

I've only had two excellent managers in my career, people who had studied management, were also technical, and cared about being effective at their jobs so the people they managed could be effective as well. These folks had formal training, undertaken of their own initiative, and it absolutely showed in all facets of what they did. Top notch folks!

I suspect this lack of training is an American phenomenon, but have no data to back up the claim.

I think the lack of training is probably worldwide. I'm in the UK and have seen it in most companies here (although can only provide anecdotal evidence).

Training is expensive and increased productivity is hard to measure - coupled together you see training as a cost with no tangible benefit.

They then just expect their employees to learn everything in their own time (which from your employers perspective, is free). There's a kind of horrifying logic to it really.

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.

The best managers I've ever had used to be programmers and understood this. I've never seen these people as bosses and working with them was a constant joy almost every day. Sadly they are the minority.

Managers start to feel like bosses when they don't have any technical background. The teams they manage are usually made up of juniors without much technical experience either, they'll be programmers rather than engineers reinforcing the "pop culture" Alan Kay talks about.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

If that's how stand-ups are treated then I'd say they're being done incorrectly. The point is to create visibility within the team. People know what's going on and can help, adjust their plans accordingly, etc. We do them even when the boss is out of the office.

"Even when"? Should the boss be in those meetings?

All the agile talk is about empowering teams; yet the boss is monitoring every step. I'm with the OP; its another way to supervise.

"Even when" as in he's not the reason the meetings occur. The boss is there because he too has things to report that inform the team.

This sounds downright dehumanizing. fuck

Rosz just doesn't give a shit.

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