HappyLabs.io

"A happy team builds a happy product"

There was a point in my career not so long ago that I would have discounted the above statement, I believed deeply and truly that hiring the best people with the strongest desire to be the best would yield the better product or the better performing team.

I was wrong and it honestly took hormones and a crazy year of dealing with the emotional shift that comes with estrogen to understand the importance of a happy team and a happy me.

Over the last few months I've had some reoccurring thoughts about how to take the "happiness temperature" of the team, these have been inspired by some reoccurring events such as people leaving, people generally being unhappy and less productive.

My first thought is that of culture, and while we can sow the seeds that might represent values, we still can't control what they will grow into due to organic nature of growth. Culture comes from the people on your team, it is your team, if there are no people on your team then you have no culture.

One method is to follow something like the Spotify health check.

I think this is great for the more established team, but what if you aren't ready for the level of granularity yet or your team isn't emotionally invested in the idea.

Introducing HappyLabs.io, the idea is pretty simple, sign up to create your lab, invite your team then connect your team calendar with your lab.

Once your team is connected they can use the web, desktop or mobile clients to leave feedback on how they feel about a point in time, this is why we connect to your team calendar, to help you reconcile mood with an event.

You can also request feedback from your team, we recommend sending a couple of requests initially to help build that behaviour into your team, your happy lab can become a central part of keeping your team happy.

You can find the beta at https://happylabs.io ..some time in the future!