Happiness as an organisational performance metric
Are “happy” people more productive?
You would be surprised to know that the problem on how to quantify happiness at work is well known and studied from decades. You can measure your “employee turnover” or attrition rate and infer happiness. You can use a more direct approach, similarly to the way you quantify your customer’s satisfaction with a Net Promoter Score (NPS).
In Scrum, there are more than one “Happiness Metrics” and they all derive from the work done at Toyota by Taiichi Ono about what Kaizen should be, and the best ways to get there.
And I have been there.
I have been lucky enough to be the scrum master of a team that was called by other teams across the organization “the happy team”. It is not common to have such a combination of professionality, synergy of goals and intents, respect, team culture, sense of autonomy, purpose, fulfilment.
The apex was to see the team eating cakes together (or healthier substitutions sometimes) just after passionate retrospectives. The happy team wasn’t living in a sort of ideal or fake happy bubble. Not at all.
The team was working hard, feeling the pressure of aggressive timelines, having difficulties, even some recurring issues. Conflicts were just healthy tensions among different…
