Team happiness and calendars
Pedro Gomes
SaaS Product Manager I SaaS Product Owner, ICP - PDM I Management 3.0 I PM3 I Lean Inception I IA enthusiast I Miro
Hello again! Today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite Management 3.0 practices, the Niko Niko Calendar! Having a happy and engaged team is key to developing good quality software while bringing them closer together as a team. They will also be happier to participate in the upstream of your development process. It's a way to have a team that comes a little closer to the team described by Cagan in Inspired. The Niko Niko Calendar helps us see daily if our team members are well and happy and can be a lot of fun to fill out!
The Niko Niko Calendar is a calendar that must be filled in every day. The normal template gives us four mood options: "awesome day", "good day", "bad day" and "horrible day". Each team member should use the emoji that represents the mood of the current day and briefly explain why they feel that way if they want. We can also create a graph to see the average mood of the team or person.
I implemented Niko Niko shortly after I joined the team in 2022. My idea was to know how my teammates were feeling so that I could have individual or group conversations with the intention of correcting what made them unhappy. I also believed that this could make our daily meetings more fun.
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I copied the Management 3.0 template for the team Mic and put in a few different emojis as a suggestion. After our daily icebreaker, I introduced Niko Niko and explained that we could try any emoji or gif if it represented how the person is feeling. They also accepted my other suggestion of briefly explaining how the way we are feeling that day is represented by the emoji. As time went on, we increased our set of emojis and even started creating new emojis by merging the ones that already existed. It’s been more than a year and we are still using it, even when I’m not able to attend the daily.
Every time we place and talk about our emojis I feel like we are a bit closer together, and it made realize just how people like to talk about how they are feeling and how important it is for them to have the team demonstrating that they care about their feelings and good health. This kind of practice is important to create a system where people truly feel a part of. I could try to create a scale so I can see historically how their happiness changes, instead of doing it once every quarter with a happiness index.