Management 3.0 – Happiness Door – Application

The pursuit of goals and results is something incredible. In any company there is a search for more results and always looking for better numbers. I know this well because I work in a bank and the numbers and the competition has always been part of that context and always will. Many people in search of results are on the margins of sanity and madness and sometimes do not balance other aspects of life very much. Around the year 2013 I was looking for excellence in my work, dedicating more than fourteen hours to my profession in a cosmetics multinational, I had blood in my eyes, responsibility for deliveries until I had symptoms of Burnout.

I was later fired due to a restructuring of the company. I felt a deep disappointment at that moment in my career, because I had given my all, excellent results and I went through a process of deep introspection, many good and bad things went through my head, but one thing I was totally decided. I had to balance my life, the personal and the professional. I had to assume some things and learn to say no. In short, I needed to seek my happiness.

The years passed, I started a consulting company, I also worked for other companies and my relationship with myself was better. I still had that need for goals and challenges as I still have today. I learned that this is part of my personality and I cannot go against it, but I also learned to be more flexible with myself and to measure how much my search for results is really making me a happy person and how much I was distancing myself from this goal.

I taught myself how to measure my happiness indexes in which I still did not have a name to define it, but I already practiced it. I observed people who were currently the same as me from my past and mentored them to explain a little of what happened to me and how they might not suffer as I had.

My actions led me to identify many tools in the market that are applied in companies, I really have an arsenal to maintain a happy atmosphere for groups and teams, but today I would like to emphasize a very interesting and simple tool. In fact, it is a union and adaptation of other methods, which does not have much secrecy. But its differential is in the form of application, periodicity, and playful form.

The Happiness Door is a simple and fun 3.0 management tool to ask people about your comments and get them quickly. You can use the door of happiness to get feedback and make people's feelings and mood visible during or at the end of a workshop or in any interaction within your team to increase engagement, collaboration, and communication. It is a combination of the Happiness Index and the Feedback Door techniques.

The idea is to plot a happiness index on 5 levels and place it on a door (that is why the “door” of happiness) where everyone passes several times a day and can leave their feedback. People can take a post-it, write down their feedback and put it on the door of happiness in the appropriate 1-5 index. In times of pandemic, it is necessary to adapt to the virtual context, but without losing the essence. 

To learn more about the tool, I suggest checking the website:

https://management30.com/practice/happiness-door/ 

APPLICATION:

As I work with 6 agile teams, I took advantage of a ceremony that I normally do not apply dynamics, which is Refinement, usually held in the middle of a Sprint. Many people do not pay due attention to this information and there are people who say that we do not mention much value in it. I see it as a ceremony as valuable as a Planning and that is why I chose to do it precisely to have real and sincere feedback. Many already know that refinement is a backlog preparation.

In this specific team we have a small group of 5 people which makes it a very interesting environment and with a better time to work. Always in all sessions, I ask for feedbacks and nobody, as usual, likes to fill out forms, either in person or online, but I know that many like to give opinions.

I already noticed that the pace of refinements was slowed down, some had parallel meetings and the team's commitment was falling. And we structured the dynamics as follows:

1. The first part was to prepare a board in Miro to apply the dynamics after the refinement.
2. During the presentation of the refinement, I wrote down important points of the meeting to generate inputs to the Happiness Door
3. I presented at the end of the refinement, asking how they felt at the end of the ceremony and asked them to put on the Miro board online with their respective happiness index on a scale of 1 to 5 represented by emoticons.
4. I explained what each indicator was even though they were self-explanatory.

1. I asked them to put their happiness index based on 03 directions. Conducting the ceremony, Cadence of date and time and Free themes.
2. We read the boards and generated some interesting actionable ones and one of them generated a brainstorming session.

The results of the application were good, and they requested these moments more times for conversations with the team. In a way, they asked for the practice to be performed more often and that we should always set aside 5 to 10 minutes at the end of each meeting for a self-analysis.

Learnings and suggestions:

•  As a facilitator I learned that together with the happiness index, it is important to give a guideline of what we are referring to, that is, always link the question of happiness to a theme and not leave it open to different perceptions. Precisely to focus on actionable.
• A dynamic like this always makes it actionable and in order not to be left open, I suggest making a distribution of activities of what each one can do. In my case, the need arose to create a brainstorming session that we held 2 days later and that have already had positive effects.
• In addition, as a facilitator, I used the tool for self-analysis and continuous improvement. Self-criticism is also fundamental to the learning process.
• Explaining the scale well is recommended even if it is with self-explanatory emoticons.
• Do not underestimate the dynamics. It is simple yet powerful, prepare well before applying it so that it does not get out of context.
• And do not apply simply by applying, everything has a purpose and understanding the nature of the purpose is the heart of the tool.

I thank the instructor Erick Masgo for sharing the knowledge of Management 3.0.

Daniel Páez

Master Coach, Agile Coach, Job Hunter, Especialista en Recolocación y Carrera. Vloguero, orador, escritor, adicto a las redes sociales y emprendedor. Director de la empresa DPáez Carrera e Recolocación

La misión de mi vida es hacer que consigas el trabajo de tus sue?os.