Niko-Niko Calendar - Tracking your Team’s Happiness can be Fun & Engaging

Introduction

These Days alternative management ways of thinking are rising. It is well articulated in Gilb's Measurability Principle: “Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.” In other words, a measurement does not have to be perfect or even very precise, as long as your intent is to get a quantitative handle on something that was previously purely qualitative; the important thing is to take that first step toward quantifying.?

By way of illustration, one of the key indicators is the?happiness?(mood) of the team members, which has been proved impacting directly key aspects i.e., How team members are feeling, respective trends of teams and how it going to impact individual’s or team’s productivity, motivation or well-being which is generally seen as entirely subjective and thus impossible/difficult to measure and track and at times it’s overlooked.

Why should you read this article?

• Do you want to simply know what is Niko-Niko practice from Management 3.0?
• Do you observe team members without encouragement, unfocused in daily meetings, little concentrated, and in several cases not talking to any team member? And wondering how to break those barriers and help team members?
• Are you planning to experiment Niko-Niko calendar with your team but wondering how to kick off in a step-by-step pattern?
• How to interpret data points/trends coming out post-implementation of this practice and use it towards making your team(s) a high-performing team(s)?
• Do you want to explore/know how to get buy-in from leadership & teams, challenges I encountered while experimenting & outcome observed?
• How does this practice add value at different levels (In my case, Team & Program (Agile Release Train (ART)) level)?
• Lastly, do you want to know how to scale and sustain this practice?

If your answer is “Yes” for any of the above-mentioned questions, then this article may be of your help.

What is Niko-Niko Calendar?

The Niko-Niko Calendar is a technique that can be incorporated as a daily practice of a team to allow evaluation of their working day.?Niko-Niko in Japanese means ‘with a smile’. It was created at the Fujitsu Software Technologies Limited in Yokohama by Ms. Sachiko Kuruda in the year 2005. It allows teams to keep track of the moods of individuals at the end of the day. The technique can be customized to suit each team and thus we can use it to capture the moods of team members multiple times even within one single day.

• Find a space to create the calendar – The objective is to create a grid-like calendar to keep track of the moods of team members. It can be created on a whiteboard, a wall, or on a sheet of paper. For remote teams, a simple excel sheet or any online tool works fine. (In my case, I created it in excel and got it uploaded in Team’s MS Team channel)
• Put the names/ Profile pictures of the team members in the 1st column.
• Create the timeline by putting the days of the month as the 1st row right at the top of the calendar. The timeline can be for the entire month or even be tracked week by week.
• Customize the board if you want to capture the mood of team members multiple times within the day, i.e., morning and afternoon.
• Define moods that must be tracked associated with a colour dot. For remote teams, this can be as simple as colouring a cell on an Excel sheet. Some teams select 3 moods while others use 4 as listed below. Teams have the freedom to customize this as relevant.

1. Great Day (Green)?– I am having an awesome day.
2. Good Day (Yellow)?– Few glitches here and there, but overall, I am having an Okay day.
3. Bad Day (Amber)?– I am having a bit of a rough day. I few things have not gone my way.
4. Horrible Day (Red)?– I am having one of the worst days of my life. Multiple things have gone wrong which has affected me directly.

• Team members add their feeling to the board at a designated time.
• The scrum master or any team member may facilitate the session. Team members mark how they feel on the Niko-Niko board using the dots provided to them. Remote team members simply colour the relevant cell.
• Everyone is asked to explain how they feel and why they used the specific-coloured dot.

?The elucidation delivers a great prospect for the team members to be open about any happy or sad conditions they are facing. While the team rejoices in any happy instances, the team may also sympathize and empathize with teammates who are having a rough day. The team may even get together to ideas to rectify that situation as well.

Why did I decide to use this practice?

As an Enterprise Agile Transformation Coach, I have often witnessed that the way people measure performance in organizations is often based on a variety of metrics (e.g., Team/Program/Portfolio/Transformation level - i.e.?Time to Market, Time to build, Story cycle time, Productivity, Quality, Customer Reported defects, Utilization and so on which I respect, however, I wanted to introduce the practice to catalyze a cultural transformation where people see measurement as a way to learn and improve, and also, a healthy and trusted environment where people feel secure talking about how is going on? ?(Please note that the respective experiment is an addition to the above-mentioned metrics).

Keeping this rationale in mind, I started experimenting Niko-Niko calendar from Management 3.0 practice with one of my Scaled Agile Transformation Consulting assignment with one of the US-based BFSI clients couple of years back (precisely at the beginning of Q4 2017). This experimentation was carried out for one of the Agile Release Train (ART) consisting of 90-100 individuals - ~10 teams. By the way, I am a part of the Agile Centre of Excellence (CoE) of my permanent employer and so even before I rolled out to said ART (Agile Release Train) at the client end; we implemented within CoE and the result was astonishing.

I decided to implement a Niko-Niko calendar on the team’s board (Kanban board). The format of the calendar allows each team member to stick, at the end of every workday, a graphic visualization & evaluation of their mood during that day. In my case, this is a coloured sticker with emojis originally: red for a bad day, yellow for neutral, orange for sad, green for a good day, and gold for an awesome day. As we get along, the Niko-Niko calendar uncovers patterns of the shift in the moods of the team, or of individual members.

How did I implement this practice?

I selected one Agile Release Train (ART) which consisted of geographically distributed teams (India & Philippines). Holistic preliminary steps looked as follows:

• I downloaded a Niko-Niko Calendar template shared on the Management 3.0 site which was created using Excel. I uploaded the file to an MS Team’s channel exclusively created for specific Agile Release Train (ART) which I was coaching.
• then explained the Niko-Niko calendar to the Scrum Masters and empowered him/her to do the preparation work in terms of adding the names of the team members and working days into the calendar.
• The Scrum Master highlighted the importance of capturing the mood in the morning and evening before winding up for the day. So, the calendar per day had two halves to capture the mood, one part in the morning and the other in the evening.
• I explained the technique to the team during a daily stand-up session and got an agreement to update the calendar and to hold two 10-minute sync-up sessions twice a day initially.

Phase 1 - Pilot Kick-off

Teams used to start their day with a remote daily stand-up event leveraging the JIRA Kanban board, where we walk the board. At this point, teams talk about the tasks and also, do a quick day planning.

Firstly, we had a simple colour scale ranging - If Individual Team member accomplishes finishing what s/he scheduled/planned to do at the end of the day then is a ?? (Happy/Green) else it is a ? (Sad/Orange), (yellow/neutral), for a lot of interruptions/context switching then ?(Angry/Red) which team kept updating on a daily basis in order to make implicit feelings explicit because talking about the individual mood helps to understand and collaborate more closely.?

Phase 2 - Incremental maturity – Scenarios based implementation

After embedding the above method into ways of working for 3 sprints (2 weeks each), we added more feelings/emojis, colours with scenarios, and had a working agreement with teams to only talk about feelings related to work issues not personal, to avoid awkward moments. Then I elevated our level and scaled the first version to a more personal and subjective one, for instance, we could stick a?/yellow/Neutral if we accomplish what we scheduled/planned but we did not feel happy about what we did or if there is something, we are not proud of. Freshly we included an extra shade: Gold one, for awesome days which are better than ?? Happy/Green good days. These are days in which teams were really proud and they want to celebrate something, based on our team values this could be because we are proud of our coherence, collaboration, proactivity, and adaptability way of work or simply because teams were really happy about what they did.?

Phase 3:?Continuous Improvement – Scaling Niko-Niko practice to other ARTs

It is rightly said that success is catching - Post witnessing the outstanding outcome of an experiment for one specific Agile Release Train (ART) for three program increments (PIs), the program leadership team wanted the Niko-Niko practice to be implemented/experimented in other three Agile Release Trains (ARTs) within the same Line of Business (LOB) consisting of ~217 individuals in total too. In order to execute the same, I facilitated a workshop for BFSI client's LACE (Lean Agile Centre of Excellence) team – a group of individuals/change agents who drive change/transformation in their respective areas, shared my learnings & shadowed them to execute a pilot implementation.

Phase 4: Envisioned Roadmap for entire Portfolio

After practicing the Niko-Niko calendar for 2 years approx., as a next step Transformation leadership has decided to scale this practice up to Solution Train & Portfolio level as well. The entire portfolio consists of 3 solution trains with ~4k individuals distributed in multiple ARTs.?Please note that my consulting engagement got over with this client for one of their Line of Business (LOB) in Dec’2019. The expected outcome from engagement has been realized and eventually, ARTs became self-sustained thus can drive change by themselves including scaling Niko-Niko calendar to portfolio level and journey continuous…

My experience as a facilitator and Learning:

It all started as an experiment. To sum up, the calendar gives me a lot of things such as:

At the core:

• The Niko-Niko Calendar alone does not make teams happier or more productive in organizations, however, it can facilitate you to identify first-hand the mood of the people in your teams, and thus be able to identify patterns over time and create a culture of collaboration, empathy, and teamwork, and then as an organization make decisions and actions to mitigate those downturns that can be identified in the calendar.

Pre-condition:

• People must be honest with their emotions and respectful to the rest of the team, avoiding criticism and value judgments for every feeling reflected in the Niko-Niko calendar, as we must explain to the team that this would help us to correctly understand the behaviour of our colleagues and help us to be more understanding of the situation that may be happening.
• The thing I consistently explain to teams is that if I feel that people telling how their day went can’t be public, there is another issue that needs to be solved. It means people are not safe. Safety is a bigger issue to address. If teams are not feeling safe to reveal this, I’ll have that issue resolved first, because psychological safety is one of the priorities?for me

Outcome Observed:

• Understanding Human Emotions and its impact on Goal:

This practice in the organization’s environments helped us, team members, to understand that we are human beings, and we are moved by emotions and that many of our behaviours, aptitudes, and attitudes are due to states of mind, and these vary depending on these emotions, which vary from person to person, understanding these team behaviours at a certain time is the key to achieving the objectives we have set.

• ?Trust & Collaboration:

When people share their daily feelings and moods, a climate of greater trust is created between them. In this way, a calendar entry with a negative emotion can be an excuse for a partner to come forward and offer to help solve or mitigate the problem causing it. Thereby, instead of the reactive team became proactive to start addressing problems/issues/concerns/ coming out from the team as a team towards self-organization.

We have included a new vocabulary, during the day if anyone needs some help from any colleague, that person can ask another person in which colour is s/he in and accordingly act.

As a human being, I feel that people are more apprehensive about how their teammates are going on. Thanks to that it has emerged healthy and polite conversations talking about why an individual is in yellow or red, in order to know better each other and see whether an individual can help other teammates. We never force people to be in red, this is the bottom line.

Scrum Master’s involvement to resolve/address team issues, etc. reduced by ~25% after 6 months of practicing Niko-Niko. As a result, scrum Masters were able to focus more on coaching.

The team’s psychological safety index (Internal survey) increased by 20% as team members became more transparent & honest in their communication.

• Coaching:

The emotional and behavioural patterns which are coming out by visualizing?Team’s Niko-Niko calendar are often useful in 1:1 conversations/coaching sessions or even casual remote conversations. I have even seen teammates talk to each other e.g., what happened mate? you are having bad days every day, etc. And it is good because as human beings it’s good that we try to be happy, but it also makes sense for us to show empathy to others.

• ?Commitment:

One remarkable thing I noticed is the commitment; people filled this information in every day in a trusted way. Moreover, it has become a habit.

• ?Niko-Niko Advocate:

After practicing it for almost 1.5 yrs., team members became an advocate of the Niko-Niko Calendar and started sharing success stories beyond the team. As a result, other LoBs (Line of Business) became interested, and we started receiving requests (~15 requests) to conduct Niko-Niko workshops/training?for them.

Added Value:

• If there are a lot of Greens/Happy, it could be a good moment to introduce new cool things. If there is a red wave, we should introduce something to fix this but not new trendy things, might be it is not a good moment for experiments.

If everything is green ‘consistently for a long run’ then there might some issue. That is where I recommend integrating this practice with Happiness Door or Kudo card in order to surface abstract issues.

If everything is red ‘consistently for a long run’ then there might some real issues to be addressed. That is where I had a 1:1 discussion with team members, followed by a leadership discussion in order to zero down the root cause.

• Not everything that counts can be counted but with this calendar, I also tried to follow a couple of rules in order to make it insightful:?promote our team values and transparency, because people can come to it and show how we are feeling, day after day (we?measure it often, I mean daily), and because Niko-Niko?visualizes and humanize?a great metric, which is a great start on how people interpret metrics. Thereby, teams have started embedding scrum values which are focus, courage, respect, commitment, openness in their ways of working by design.
• From a retrospective standpoint, I was able to identify patterns and make a much more precise retrospective event on the team’s mood and passion. That was fantastic. For the subsequent retrospectives, we had a look at what makes us happy and what is important for our mood. It was not only the feedback ethos itself or the openness of the team this was already on a highly supportive, collaborative, and personal level. We found out that individual capability is highly combined to individual felt happiness in the team.
• As time has passed, has been even elaborated graphical statistics about the evolution of the mood every month, so we can even classify trends for the whole Agile Release Train (ART). At the beginning of every month, I collect the information of the previous month from the calendar and introduce it into different excel sheets so that the identification of trends can be made. Afterward, the different reports are sent by e-mail and made this report available to the entire Agile Release Train (ART).
• Though the Niko-Niko tool is for every role, however, especially in my case it proved as a tool for the scrum masters & RTEs (Release Train Engineers) to identify a couple of team members who needed special attention and decided to take necessary action.?

Next Step:

• I have made it standard practice for all my future assignments the basis of success observed as a part of the aforementioned engagement.
• The teams decided that the Niko-Niko calendar needs to be continued for the entire Agile Release Train (ART). Keeping track of it online helps maintain it for continuous improvement & learning and it was decided to continue using the same way.
• The teams decided that a method to capture the primary reason for the mood is important and felt that at the moment this is limited to a mere discussion. The effective way to record this is to be explored by the team as they get along.

Conclusion:

These days, the most important value companies have is the people that work for them, and the?happiness?of their employees is a key indicator that deserves to be measured. The?Niko- Niko?calendar can help to measure such a subjective indicator. With this development of our individual customized way of implementing this practice which fits the team's need we could develop ourselves, can easily handle jobs inside the team, make implicit topics like mood, motivation, or in our latest case workload visible, transparent, and tangible. The visibility helps us to raise awareness so that the team can develop a more helpful collaboration culture. There is no single solution, which fits all needs –

I passionately recommend & persuade you and your team to give it a try.?It’s definitely worth it.?

If you want to explore/learn more about Niko-Niko Calendar, you can look at Management 3.0 page at ?https://management30.com/practice/niko-niko-calendar/

DISCLAIMER:

• The article is prepared & compiled basis on my personal Management 3.0 practice implementation experience/view-only; you may have your own version too.
• As the project's Niko - Niko implementation images are classified; have not been shared/published with this article.