Happiness Index
Our primary metric is “Happy Syncopater Index” or HSI. It’s the only thing we systemically measure and follow up. Scale is 1-5. The data lives in a dashboard where all can see it (a shared Google spreadsheet).
There’s pretty strong peer pressure for people to update this, and most of us do. Some every month, others less frequently. But 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 saw this and got so excited 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. Cool :o)
Survey questions
The 3 main questions in the survey are:
- How happy are you with being here? This is the main overarching happiness index.
- How happy are you with your tasks? This means internal work such as board meetings, conference facilitation, or creating this Syncopate 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 us, 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.
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 capture other info as well, 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 to read what people write!
Sometimes we get 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.
Whenever the average changes significantly, we talk about why, and what we can do to make everybody happier. If we see a 1 or 2 on any row, that 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.
HSI 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.