Happiness Index

Our primary metric is our “Happy Index”. It’s the only thing we systemically measure and follow up. Scale is 1-5. The data lives in our dashboard (a shared Google spreadsheet).

Guilt or peer pressure form colleagues is the main reason for people to update this, because nobody is forced. Remember, one of our core values is freedom, so nobody forces anyone to do anything. But all in all this gives us a great overview of what’s working and what needs to be fixed.

Jeff Sutherland got so excited about using the Happiness metric that he wrote an article called Happiness Metric - the wave of the future and now teaches webinars on it and talks about it all over the world.

Survey questions

The 3 main questions in the survey are:

• How happy are you with being at the Collective? This is the main overarching happiness index.
• How happy are you with your tasks in the Collective? This means internal work such as board meetings, conference facilitation, or even creating this DNA site. This is especially relevant for our office team, who do most internal work and have no external clients of their own.
• How happy are you with your current client, or your bench situation? We measure this separately, because sometimes a person could be really happy with the Collective, but sad about the current client. Or vice versa. For people who are on the bench (= no client at the moment), this can express how they feel about that (sometimes people WANT to be on the bench).

The scale is:

• 5 = Super-happy! Don’t want to change anything!
• 4 = Pretty happy, but there are some things that need to be fixed.
• 3 = I can live with this, but there are many things that need to be fixed.
• 2 = Not feeling so good about this right now.
• 1 = This is crap! I want out.

NOTE: For now, we choose to make our index non-anonymous because as we value a high-trust culture, and encourage people people to be uninhibited about expressing their thoughts and opinions.

We also have a “last updated” column where people enter the date as they update their numbers. When many entries start looking old (as in > 2 months) then we’ll usually start nagging each other to update it. Especially a few days before a conference or board meeting, since we use the happiness data to generate insights and trigger actions.

We have a few additional text columns as well, to gather further info. They are all optional.

• What feels best right now?
• What feels worst right now?
• What would increase your happiness level?
• How will I contribute to raising the overall happiness level?
• Other comments.

It’s very interesting hiow this works!

It can cause cascading effects - for example Joe is pissed off about something, and other people are sad because Joe is upset, so all numbers go down. That’s good though! The problem is now highly visible and measurable, so we’re more likely to fix it.

How we use the happiness data

The happiness index is used as key artifact during board meetings, and to print and bring to the bi-annual unconference.

Whenever the average changes significantly, we can talk about why, and what we can do to make everybody happier. If there is a 1 or 2 on any row, this acts as an effective call for help. People go out of their way to find out how they can help that person, which often results in some kind of process improvement in the company.

For example, if somebody dropped to a 1 due to confusion and frustration with our internal invoicing routines. Within a week we would have a workshop and figure out a better process. The company will improve and the Happiness Index increased.

Our Happiness Index is more important than any financial metric, not only because it visualizes the aspect that matters most to us, but also because it is a leading indicator, which makes us more agile. Most financial metrics are trailing indicators, making it hard to react to change in time.

Happiness history

We use a separate spreadsheet to show how the average happiness changes over time, and how it correlates to specific events. We update the history manually - from time to time someone simply copies the average happiness values and adds to the history table, and the history chart gets updated.