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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

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:

The scale is:

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.

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.