Happiness Quotient

Every retrospective meeting, my team would follow the same pattern — answering what went well, what didn’t go well, and what we should start doing. These questions did a good job of structuring the conversation but I always felt like they were incomplete. Like a chair with a missing leg — almost structurally complete but not yet useful without the missing piece.

A few weeks ago, at the end of a stressful sprint, we gathered in a conference room to retro. Everyone complained about the long hours, unreasonable expectations, and poor communication. It was great feedback but was hard to measure in magnitude for comparison and didn’t come with potential remedies. That info had to be pried out of the team in a summary discussion much later.

That’s when it hit me — instead of asking the team to list the things that went well or poorly in the last two weeks, why not ask them how happy they were at work in the last two weeks? By giving a happiness quotient to the sprint, the team is forced to consider how certain events made them feel. That analysis, in theory, could result in much better feedback.

So we followed through. Everyone got 5 pieces of paper with a number 1–5 and one of the following faces on each. 1 being Very Unhappy and 5 being Very Happy. Each team member would vote with one expression.

Team responses were averaged out to represent a collective Team Happiness Quotient. Our first score was a 2.5 — between a somewhat unhappy and neutral. This is when things got interesting. Asking “how do we bring our collective happiness up to 3.5?” resulted in a barrage of very specific suggestions.

“We should have more frequent updates”
“We shouldn’t max out our capacity”
“We should have more detailed design discussions”

Moreover, we were able to ask each other which action would have a bigger impact on our happiness — an instant ability to rank suggestions by their potential impact. By following up on the next sprint’s Happiness Quotient (HQ), we could measure the effectiveness of each change against our expectations and tweak things accordingly.

Last sprint, our score was a 3.5! We met our goal! But that wasn’t enough. We asked again, “how do we bring our collective happiness up to 4.5?”

“I’d be happier if my machine worked faster”
“I’d be happier if we did a team event”

Interestingly, an unhappy team (< 3HQ) talks about what should be done. A happy team (> 3HQ) talks about “happier”. Anyway, this week, I’m upgrading workstations for my team members and buying tools they need to be more productive. Every sprint, measuring the Happiness Quotient is allowing me to peel layers to get to the root of employee satisfaction in a way that traditional methods couldn’t. I plan on continuing to ask “how can you be happier” until my team gets to a 5 and you should too.