Happiness Index

Our primary metric Happiness, is measured in our Happiness Index. It’s the only thing we systemically measure and follow up. We use a 1-5 scale and there are three core parts to the Index:

• Happiness index - how happy are we and why?
• Happiness history - how has the happiness index developed over time?
• Decision log - log of Organa-wide that decisions have been made

There’s pretty strong peer pressure for people to update this, and most of us do and it’s mostly done every fortnight. But nobody is forced (remember one of our core values is freedom, so nobody forces anyone to do anything). All in all this gives us a solid overview of what’s working and what needs to be fixed.

Survey questions

The four main questions in the survey are:

• How happy are you with being at Organa? This is the main overarching happiness index.
• How happy are you with your tasks in Organa? This means internal work such as board meetings, conference facilitation, or creating this Organa DNA site.
• How happy are you with your current client, or your bench situation? We measure this separately, because sometimes a person could be happy with Organa, but sad about the current client. Or vice versa. For Members who are not currently with a client, this can express how they feel about that.
• How equitable does it feel right now? The Member reflects on their contribution to Organa and the contribution of others.

The scale is:

• 5 = Super happy thanks very much, don’t need to change anything.
• 4 = Pretty happy, but there are some things that need to be fixed.
• 3 = I can live with this, but there are many things that need to be fixed.
• 2 = Not feeling so good about this right now.
• 1 = This is shit, I want out.

NOTE: If you copy this survey, remember that you can of course make it anonymous. We chose to make it non-anonymous because we have a high-trust culture and people are pretty uninhibited about expressing their thoughts and opinions.

We also have a “last updated” column where people enter the date as they update their numbers. If entries start looking old (as in > 2 months) then we’ll start hassling each other to update it.

We have a few additional text columns as well, to gather further info. They are all optional.

• What feels best right now?
• What feels worst right now?
• What would increase your happiness level?
• How will I contribute to raising the overall happiness level?
• Other comments.

It’s pretty interesting to read what people write.

How we use the happiness data

The happiness index is used as key artifact during board meetings, and we also refer to it at our Homecomings and Annual Adventures.

Whenever the average changes significantly, we talk about why, and what we can do to make everybody happier. If we see a 1 or 2 on any row, that acts as an effective call for help. People go out of their way to find out how they can help that person, which often results in some kind of process improvement in the company. Or something.

Organa Happiness Index is more important than any financial metric, not only because it visualises the aspect that matters most to us, but also because it is a leading indicator, which makes us more agile. Most financial metrics are trailing indicators, making it hard to react to change in time.

Who is responsible for keeping it up to date?

We currently share the responsibility.