Happiness Index is a simple hack to help provoke conversations about how things are going. It’s simple to get started:
- Put a piece of flipchart paper on the wall
- Create a zero to one-hundred scale
- Ask people to put an “X” each day or week to indicate how happy they are
- Use this data in a retrospective
This is the Happiness Index one of our managers did and you can see the team happiness increased over time. This team was the Enterprise Architecture team and they were in a state of confusion after a re-org had decreased their group from 20 to 4. They were left without a manager and direction. When this new manager took over, happiness and clarity went up.
Here’s the Happiness Index chart our coaching team used:
We used this internally, the manager never looked at it or asked us about it.