Tracking Joy at Work
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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.
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.
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.
That said, it helps me keep budgets more. If I don't check mint periodically through the month, making sure I'm on track for goals, then I have a tendency to overspend.
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!
But maybe you're right in the area of emotions and feelings. I think humans know inherently what is optimal when it comes to social situations, but we're still trying to codify exactly what that is. For instance, we know that people work better with sunlight and plants in the office. We could do an informal measurement of sorts simply by asking around, do you like this?
But ultimately I think that's what they are doing here, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Qualitative doesn't imply unmeasurable.
If something is unmeasurable, there is no way to tell if it's changed.
If you can tell if something has changed, and you have no feelings about it, you can measure it, but not optimize it, because you can't force it towards your preference.
If you can tell if something has changed, and you know how you feel about it, you can always just say "I feel better about this since last time" or "I feel worse about this since last time." There you go, you can graph how you think of the thing over time, and steadily increase how much you like it.
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.
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
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.
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?
With almost no paid advertising, more than 100 companies use CompanyMood (mostly in Germany over 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.
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 ;)
<shameless plug> I built Moodprint (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.
"What companies really need to measure is not how engaged their employees are, but rather how consistently energized they feel."
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.
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?"
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.
[1] http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood...
[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machin...
I found that concept extremely fascinating.
The services are wired together with https://github.com/begriffs/microservice-template
Send me an email if you want help setting things up. joe@begriffs.com