A bit of background: I joined a team for a short 4 month stint. There were a series of projects on this agency at the time. After a number of consecutive busy weeks in preparation of presentations, I left a disconnect with my team and other colleagues on the larger floor. There were barely any chats by the water cooler some afternoons which was a serious bother for me. I really wanted to know how everyone was doing. Was everyone just busy with work? Was there more going on? So, one afternoon, I placed amap in the kitchen area so people could “plot” how they felt on this map each day. People began huddling there, looking at the way the map evolved. Mind you, it was only a paper map and nothing sophisticated but hey, it started a conversation and shunned the silence.

Here’s a bit on that.

Purpose of the map

• Offer a moment to reflect and anonymously share how one is feeling and how others are feeling.
• Make visible how everyone in the room is feeling for that “me too”
• Explore and understand engagement, overtime through iterations.
• Increase team-productivity by understanding collective emotions.

Findings

There were 56 entries made in total. It’s nice to know that happy was the most popular, followed by the also familiar feelings of being tired and then frustrated.

Popular emotions this week (iteration 1)

Happy- 7 entries

Tired- 6 entries

Frustrated- 5 entries

Good- 4 entries

Relaxed- 4 entries

Sense of achievement, interest, zoned-out- 3 entries

What’s great is that people added emotions like hungry, anxious, sense of achievement, distracted, zoned-out to the map. This Sense of achievement was also our latest entry at 7.45pm (looks like, staying back was totally worth it! ) and our earliest entry was at 8.30am being pleased (yes, I would be very pleased with myself too if I made it to work that early).

I also became curious to see what emotions were common at what time of the day and so arranged it in 2 hour segments.

18 entries were made between 8.30–11am

Good- 3

Relaxed- 3

Happy- 2

Determination- 2

10 entries were made between 11am-1pm

Focus- 2

Happy- 2

Frustrated- 2

15 entries were made between 1pm-3pm

Distracted- 2

Zoned out- 2

3 entries were made between 3pm-5pm

Happy- 1

Frustrated- 1

Relaxed- 1

14 entries were made post 5pm

Tired-3

Sense of achievement-1

Emotion Map- Iteration 2 (Placed in the kitchen area)

For the second iteration, I wanted I arranged the map differently and used different mediums. This time I created time slots to help analyse more efficiently and allotted 15 pieces of string to each time-slot. I asked my colleagues to pick a string based on the time they were recording and wrap it around the felt emotion. The emotions were arranged in two columns- left were the more positive ones and the ones on the right negative.

Findings

It got messy and the strings made it dramatic- as expected.

I stopped recording when the strings from the any time-slot ran out. 3pm to 6pm ran out of its strings first as it was the most popular time for people to record emotions. People recorded the most positive emotions around this time too thought 9–12 seems like a happy time-slot too. ‘Contentment’ was the most popular positive emotion felt- 6 votes and ‘Relaxed’ with 5 votes.

Between 12noon to 3pm people recorded the most negative emotions compared to any other time-slots- 24 recorded. ‘Tired’ with 7 votes was the most popular negative emotion felt, which wasn’t surprising seeing the late nights people were pulling for the upcoming sprint reviews.