"You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and what better to measure than an activity that consumes your waking life. Work."
Does anyone else think the phrase "you can't improve what you can't measure" is nonsense? I think that most improvements are qualitative and inherently unmeasurable.
I'm not downplaying the importance of measuring, but we have to be careful when trying to reduce qualitative changes down to metrics. Too many times I've seen businesses or teams try to measure qualitative changes, and then spend so much time optimizing for their metrics that they qualitatively regress. Measurements are not magic bullets that remove the need for good intuition.
If something is unmeasurable, there is no way to tell if it's changed.
If you can tell if something has changed, and you have no feelings about it, you can measure it, but not optimize it, because you can't force it towards your preference.
If you can tell if something has changed, and you know how you feel about it, you can always just say "I feel better about this since last time" or "I feel worse about this since last time." There you go, you can graph how you think of the thing over time, and steadily increase how much you like it.
Well you can never be sure you improved without measurement of some sort.
But maybe you're right in the area of emotions and feelings. I think humans know inherently what is optimal when it comes to social situations, but we're still trying to codify exactly what that is. For instance, we know that people work better with sunlight and plants in the office. We could do an informal measurement of sorts simply by asking around, do you like this?
But ultimately I think that's what they are doing here, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Yep, some things can be quantified, some can't. Ironically, programmers who steadfastly insist on objective data bristle at the thought of their own productivity being measured. (Lines of code per day? Bugs fixed per day? No, no, code is an _art_ that can't be reduced to some number. Just everything else in the universe can be!)
I did something similar for myself based on TagTime [1] from the same folks who made beeminder.
I'd suggest not enforcing a minimum spacing between samplings. The minimum spacing tends to push samplings towards the ends and center of the day. It also gives the randomness memory. I noticed when I was sampling myself, my behavior would subtly change after a sampling when I knew I wouldn't be sampled for a little while. Although, I don't think this would cause a meaningful problem in your context.
Thanks for pointing this out! In addition to not wanting a minimum, it's also bad to fix the number of samples. Then you know that the more you get sampled the less likely additional samples are. Might not matter for some applications but, as you say, it can subtly affect your behavior.
The right way to do the sampling is as a Poisson process, ie, where the gaps between samples are drawn from an exponential distribution. Details: http://tagti.me
Back in 2012 we were also curious about that topic and developed a service called CompanyMood (https://www.company-mood.com)
It tracks the mood of invited employees on a weekly basis.
We thought, instead of asking for specific feelings it would be more intuitive to estimate the mood from 0(lowest) to 100.
Furthermore you can organize your team/company in departments, use an anonymous complaint/suggestion box and get an overview via a dashboard that shows all metrics in a graphical overview.
This is great! I love to see people exploring mood tracking and looking for correlations and insights. I hope you write more about what this helps you discover.
<shameless plug> I built Moodprint (http://moodprint.com) to do the same sort of thing. It's using random sampling as well, though it's personal as opposed to team-based, and it allows free-form mood entry. Some people have been using it for >6 months, and it's helped find patterns around work and relationships, for instance.
While this comment does not offer a tracking mechanism or a tool, I do believe you can measure and feel when an environment gets better. More subjective than most would like...but you can definitely observe a difference in behaviors.
The UN also thought that this was important. There are more details at liveHappy.com and #HappyActs. There is an upcoming International Happiness Day on March 20th.
In our office we are celebrating the day with everything from team walks, Jenga competitions, popcorn, and managers serving the employees ice cream, as well as building a Happiness Wall.
I can tell you over a year of diligently addressing team morale...it is nothing Big Bang it is consistent small steps and paying attention to the employees and their needs.
I wonder: Do you derive value from the use of a 1-5 scale? Do you have set definitions for each level, or is that left up to the responder?
I have a certain curiosity sometimes about the use of 1-5 or 1-10 scales, where it seems like a simple boolean response could be appropriate. In this context, I could see an interesting experiment in simply asking, as a yes/no question, "Are you content?"
At Osper we use an electronic Niko Niko[1] board to track daily mood. I find it helpful for uncovering issues in the company early though of course it isn't the only source.
This is basically the idea of the algedonic meter that was set to be part of Chile's project Cybersyn in the 1970s [1] before a military coup overthrew the Allende government.
Linden Labs, the company that built Second Life, used to have a "Love machine", used to "give" love points to other co-workers (as a result of a good interaction or contribution).
Yeah, it's mostly just open source software inside. Grafana for the charting which gets its data from InfluxDB. The happiness bot is broken into three haskell programs, a scheduler, a soliciter, and a server which listens for slack responses.
[+] [-] cle|11 years ago|reply
Does anyone else think the phrase "you can't improve what you can't measure" is nonsense? I think that most improvements are qualitative and inherently unmeasurable.
I'm not downplaying the importance of measuring, but we have to be careful when trying to reduce qualitative changes down to metrics. Too many times I've seen businesses or teams try to measure qualitative changes, and then spend so much time optimizing for their metrics that they qualitatively regress. Measurements are not magic bullets that remove the need for good intuition.
[+] [-] danieljeff|11 years ago|reply
I've seen it attributed to Peter Drucker as well.
I think the general notion that it is more difficult to improve things that you can't/don't measure is fairly accurate.
[+] [-] tedks|11 years ago|reply
Qualitative doesn't imply unmeasurable.
If something is unmeasurable, there is no way to tell if it's changed.
If you can tell if something has changed, and you have no feelings about it, you can measure it, but not optimize it, because you can't force it towards your preference.
If you can tell if something has changed, and you know how you feel about it, you can always just say "I feel better about this since last time" or "I feel worse about this since last time." There you go, you can graph how you think of the thing over time, and steadily increase how much you like it.
[+] [-] ianstallings|11 years ago|reply
But maybe you're right in the area of emotions and feelings. I think humans know inherently what is optimal when it comes to social situations, but we're still trying to codify exactly what that is. For instance, we know that people work better with sunlight and plants in the office. We could do an informal measurement of sorts simply by asking around, do you like this?
But ultimately I think that's what they are doing here, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.
[+] [-] throwawaymsft|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harterrt|11 years ago|reply
I'd suggest not enforcing a minimum spacing between samplings. The minimum spacing tends to push samplings towards the ends and center of the day. It also gives the randomness memory. I noticed when I was sampling myself, my behavior would subtly change after a sampling when I knew I wouldn't be sampled for a little while. Although, I don't think this would cause a meaningful problem in your context.
Thanks for the writeup! Very interesting.
[+] [-] dreeves|11 years ago|reply
The right way to do the sampling is as a Poisson process, ie, where the gaps between samples are drawn from an exponential distribution. Details: http://tagti.me
[+] [-] orlandopoli|11 years ago|reply
It tracks the mood of invited employees on a weekly basis.
We thought, instead of asking for specific feelings it would be more intuitive to estimate the mood from 0(lowest) to 100.
Furthermore you can organize your team/company in departments, use an anonymous complaint/suggestion box and get an overview via a dashboard that shows all metrics in a graphical overview.
[+] [-] andrea_sdl|11 years ago|reply
I'm a big believer of tracking mood, although it must be very easy to integrate into the daily workflow.
How did your project evolved?
[+] [-] wozmirek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bscofield|11 years ago|reply
<shameless plug> I built Moodprint (http://moodprint.com) to do the same sort of thing. It's using random sampling as well, though it's personal as opposed to team-based, and it allows free-form mood entry. Some people have been using it for >6 months, and it's helped find patterns around work and relationships, for instance.
[+] [-] hammock|11 years ago|reply
"What companies really need to measure is not how engaged their employees are, but rather how consistently energized they feel."
[+] [-] nickpo|11 years ago|reply
The UN also thought that this was important. There are more details at liveHappy.com and #HappyActs. There is an upcoming International Happiness Day on March 20th.
In our office we are celebrating the day with everything from team walks, Jenga competitions, popcorn, and managers serving the employees ice cream, as well as building a Happiness Wall.
I can tell you over a year of diligently addressing team morale...it is nothing Big Bang it is consistent small steps and paying attention to the employees and their needs.
[+] [-] jdmichal|11 years ago|reply
I have a certain curiosity sometimes about the use of 1-5 or 1-10 scales, where it seems like a simple boolean response could be appropriate. In this context, I could see an interesting experiment in simply asking, as a yes/no question, "Are you content?"
[+] [-] jeffwass|11 years ago|reply
On a scale from 1 to 5, how much value do you derive from the use of a 1 to 5 scale?
True or False - it's OK to limit subjective questions to Boolean responses.
[+] [-] squirrel|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood...
[+] [-] zenogais|11 years ago|reply
[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machin...
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|11 years ago|reply
I found that concept extremely fascinating.
[+] [-] sblawrie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] begriffs|11 years ago|reply
The services are wired together with https://github.com/begriffs/microservice-template
Send me an email if you want help setting things up. [email protected]
[+] [-] partition|11 years ago|reply