The Happiness Index – Feel the heartbeat of your team

More and more organizations are realizing the important fact that great engagement with their people, equals greater performance and stronger team spirit.?With this also comes the vital topic of feelings too. Because probably no one can simply leave their feelings far away from work and put on a “working-mask”. This is a topic we have tackled at E.ON.

The work takes more and more an important part of our life and the division to the private life blurs. Therefore, work should strengthen us more than weaken us, and the goal of us, the d lab_ is to make every team member feel comfortable and happy to come to work. But besides the purely human component, numerous studies also show that satisfied employees are more productive and ultimately benefit the company. But how do you measure the satisfaction of all employees in a team, especially in larger teams, and how do you integrate the satisfaction factor into daily work? Many companies conduct large surveys, which show a one-time picture and are only conducted at longer intervals. Does this do justice to working with satisfaction in daily work???

As d lab_ we are a team of software developers, UX/UI designers who also focus on digital marketing. We want to constantly evolve the way we work, use the latest technology and generate the best solution for our clients. In this case, the ‘client’ was us!

Our development?

The Happiness index (HIX) app was created during one of our OKR (Objective & Key Results) Circles. The original idea was to hang a tablet in the office where our app would be active throughout the day. When entering and leaving the office, each employee would vote with different smilies to the question "How are you today?” This simplicity was intended to minimize the inhibition threshold so that all team members would use this app.

At the end of each day, an evaluation could then be run. However, due to the Corona pandemic, this approach was not possible, since few to hardly any employees were still in the office. That's why we changed it to be accessible via the Internet.

The updated approach is a daily poll of the mood and it was important to us that the app was simple as well as fast, i.e. user-friendly, to use. In addition, the app should be usable on any device, but also anonymous, so that colleagues are empowered to share the emoji that truly reflects their feelings.

A falling mood in the team can be reacted to quickly and the impact can be measured when changes are made. After using the HIX app, it is always possible to see live results with our ‘happiness index’ as well as the number of votes cast on the day, but also a rolling average over the past 5 days, along with an indication whether the mood is rising or falling. In addition, statistics show two chart views to compare days or weeks as well as all data per day or week.

?And for the techies among you, here are a few details on how we implemented the app. We used Angular for the frontend and NestJS for the backend. The programming language is Typescript, the app is hosted on ESP and the database in the background is MySQL.?

HIX is a simple, web-based application with an intuitive UI. Everyone can easily create a team and share the team code or the team URL to invite team members.?

The app offers an aggregated overview of the HIX team's happiness over days, weeks, months and years. The overview is available for every team member in order to foster team transparency.?

At the d lab_ we promptly react on a low happiness index with a specific questionnaire in order to inspect the possible reasons and find solutions. Once such example of an action point, is the improvement of our remote working strategy across d lab_ that we implemented only a few months ago.??