I’ve written previously about how I like to finish up the one-to-ones with developers on my team by asking a tricky question, so it felt appropriate to also share how I always begin them:

“How happy are, out of five?”

Zero being miserable, five being super-happy.

The responses to this question provide far more insight than just “how are you?” to which 80% of responses are a variation of the cover-all-bases answer “alright”. No one ever answers that question that they’re not happy, unless they’re really unhappy and that’s the place you want to avoid getting to.

This is an idea I took from my previous line manager, and which I believe comes from the world of SCRUM. I’ve since taken it somewhat to heart and run with it, but let’s back up a little bit.

Surely happiness is such a fluid, complex concept that boiling it down to a single number is meaningless? Yes. Absolutely agree. But trying to squeeze it into that system, forces the person answering the question to analyse just how happy they are, how happy they’ve been previously and how happy they think they could and should be.

But why just out of five— such a small range must make it harder to gauge things? Yes, and that’s the point. If the scale was out of 100, or even out of 10 — that amount of choices is overwhelming, and so people most end up going for a safe 7/10 or 75% (or maybe 73% because you’re not really enjoying the project you’re on currently). My line managees will often throw in a .5 (e.g. 3.5/5) and that’s fine, but the limited choices really focuses your decision down to “am I absolutely miserable”, “am I middling” or “am I in a really good place” with only a few shades in between.

Everyone must work to a slightly different scale though? Correct. One person’s 5 is another person’s 3. Again, it’s the thought process that is really important here, and also how the latest score compares to previous scores. When a person who usually averages around a 4 suddenly drops to a 2, you know that something is amiss.

This happiness rating usually then goes on to drive the rest of conversation. Why have they dropped from a 4 to 2? What’s changed? And how can we address it? If the dialog doesn’t flow naturally, then it can be stimulated by digging into how the person arrived at that number. If you said 3 — why not a 2.5? What are those positives in your life, the small things that make your day better? And then, why not a 3.5, and what needs to change to get there? Sometimes the answer to that question provides something that the manager can address directly, other times it’s actually a change that needs to happen internally (albeit with support and guidance). Usually it’s the beginning of a larger conversation.

I am of course Gandalf

Being a geek, I of course use spreadsheets to organise and visualise absolutely anything that I can, and the happiness of my line-managees is no exception. For over a year I’ve been recording the happiness ratings for each member of my team, during their fortnightly one-to-one, in a spreadsheet (using conditional formatting to apply a gentle pastel colour palette of course). This makes it easy to see at a glance if someone is on a downward slope or displaying erratic responses. I also calculate averages for each individual and for the team as a whole — again, see my previous comments about this clearly not being a realistic measure of the complexity of human emotion, but it does provide a good quick gauge for the pulse of the team. An anonymised snippet can be seen above.

Why strive for a happy team though? It’s probably obvious but a team of happy, content employees will be more productive, less stressed and far less likely to walk out the door. They’ll also be more enthused and creative, more eager to take risks and learn new things. Absence is known to decline in a happy workplace. I am very much of the belief that if you get happiness right, then everything else will follow from there. From a purely selfish viewpoint, I also find that making others happy makes me happy. There’s an addictive buzz to be found from when you manage to get things right for people, knowing you’ve fixed a problem in someone’s life, helped them be more efficient or having taken a positive step forwards in their career.

This gauging of happiness was brought abruptly home to me recently though, following the recent suicide of Frightened Rabbit front-man Scott Hutchison. During my own struggles with depression, his music and lyrics were of particular comfort and so I was really struck by this tragedy. In what turned out to be his final interview, Scott discussed on-going struggles with negative thoughts and that on most days he was a “six out of ten” going on to say “I’m all right with a six. If I get a couple of days a week at a seven, fuck, it’s great”. His similar approach to measuring happiness numerically is striking, but when you consider that ten years earlier he had written and sung about the exact method he would then use to take his own life, you realise that for Scott he wasn’t measuring how close he was to ideal happiness, but how far he was from being so painfully unhappy that he would resort to suicide.

That really shone a light on something that I guess I had overlooked, possibly intentionally — that by measuring and trying to make people happier in their lives, we are not just chasing happiness (and lovely shades of green in a spreadsheet), but fleeing from unhappiness and the shadows that lurk at that end of the spectrum. Perhaps my obsession with keeping my team members happy is fuelled by own experiences in that dark place, when the happiness-o-meter drops into the red. Perhaps ensuring each others’ happiness isn’t just something for the work-place, where it can be justified as a productivity tool, perhaps “how happy are you out of five” needs to be a question for everyone, everyday. Let’s make it our mission to take the time to ask our friends, loved ones, those around us — are you as happy as you should be? If not, why not and what can we do to help? There won’t always be an immediate solution, but asking the question and beginning the conversation is the first step.