Use Happiness Door to get quick feedback

Surely, you know enough instruments to receive feedback, at the end of a tall, a talk or a course. Traditionally, a printed sheet with a series of personalized questions or a digital survey, either anonymous or anonymous, is used. It intends to analyze results by obtaining the answers to different questions, but its true value is in initiating this feedback process to act accordingly.

Norbert Wiener, American mathematician, considered the father of cybernetics, published in 1948 the book “Cybernetics or the control and communication in animals and machines” and used the term feedback for the first time. Wiener worked during World War II for the United States Armed Forces on a project to guide anti-aircraft artillery automatically using radar. As a result of the discoveries made in this project, it introduces the concepts of feedback or feedback, and quantity of information, into science, thus becoming a precursor to the theory of communication or cognitive psychology.

To receive fast, low-cost and sustainable feedback, Management 3.0 has a practice called Happiness Door, which allows you to ask the audience how satisfied they were during a session or meeting, or what their opinions are about something in particular. This can be done using sticky notes, and stick them on a door, wall, window or column, which is accessible and visible when leaving the meeting place. And in virtuality, you can design beautiful models to use in collaborative virtual tools.

My experience:

I want to tell you through this note, an experience that I lived with my group of deaf and hard of hearing students from the Business Administration career at a Technical Institute where I am a teacher. In February of this year, during the pandemic, I made this commitment to represent an interesting challenge in this type of education. The Rector had told me that, with virtuality, several students had withdrawn, since it had been difficult for them to keep up with the class. The first days of virtual classes began with eight students enrolled and considering what the Rector told me, from the first day I asked them how they felt, if there were doubts and although he always asked them if everything was clear, nobody dared to answer something other than a sign that all was well. In about the fourth class, I decided to use the Happiness Door practice.

How did I apply the practice?

At the end of the class, I explained to all my students the objective of the Happiness Door, which basically consisted of giving me feedback and that I emphasized, which for me was very important, to improve and adjust any details of future classes, as well. how to know how they felt.

I presented them with a Miro board, with a very nice door and options of three faces (happy, neutral, and sad).

I asked them to leave a face on the virtual door of how they left the class and only if they wanted, they will leave a note with a comment.

And very importantly, I made it clear to them that it was anonymous.

The result:

First, everyone was encouraged to leave his face. And several left important comments regarding the class: for example, they asked me to speak slower, to use synonyms for some more technical terms. Things that so far no one had commented. And most of them left happy faces.

In the next class, I thanked them for the response received, I applied the actions resulting from the suggestions received and the students were very happy with the result and even asked to go through the Happiness Door at the end of each class. Ultimately, it opened a very important feedback channel for both them and me.

It should be noted that the Directorate of the Institution found out what happened and they liked the practice a lot, even to apply it in the rest of the subjects.

My conclusions:

As a facilitator I learned the importance of early feedback, to apply improvements. I learned that there are simple options to obtain feedback, in any field despite some circumstances and that above all how important subsequent actions are since otherwise, you will lose the meaning.

My next experiment with this practice will be to implement it from day 1 and I will change the following: when entering class I will ask them to put a face of how they come, to measure the mood of the group and when leaving I will ask them to leave a comment.

I invite all readers to try this simple but very productive practice. This and many other interesting tools you can learn in a Management 3.0 Workshop.