Happiness on teams in remote environments

This article proposes a way to evaluate the happiness of teams that work in remote environments through the 12 steps of happiness proposed by Management 3.0, which can be useful to determine if there is an increase in happiness in a remote environment compared to an environment face-to-face.

In a study carried out in May 2020 by the “Observatorio de Educación e Innovacción del Tecnológico de Monterrey” in Mexico, it shows that full-time remote workers are 22% happier than those who are in person (La pandemia como catalizador de una nueva cultura laboral).

The 12 steps of happiness that Management 3.0 proposes can be used in different areas in work teams, or simply in our daily lives, these are:

1. Thank someone and be appreciative of your colleagues, every single day.

2. Give something to another person or make it possible for others to offer gifts.

3. Help someone who needs assistance, or enable colleagues to help each other.

4. Eat well, and make good, healthy foods easily available to everyone.

5. Exercise and work out regularly and make it easy for people to take care of their bodies.

6. Rest well, sleep sufficiently, and enable colleagues to refresh their minds.

7. Experience new things try stuff out, and let people run all kinds of experiments.

8. Hike outdoors, enjoy nature, and allow people an escape from the office and the city.

9. Meditate and get people to learn and adapt mindfulness practices.

10. Socialize, relate to other people and make it easy for colleagues to develop connections.

11. Aim for a goal and get people to understand and realize their purpose.

12. Smile whenever you can, appreciate humor, and get colleagues to engage in fun activities

In this month, the evaluation of the happiness of the team members was carried out, to empathize among them, derived to the lowest points that they present of the 12 steps of happiness considering the different situations that each member is experiencing. in a remote environment.

The team that experimented is made up of 4 instructors who are teaching distance classes in the field of upper secondary education.

It has been a challenge to teach remote classes for instructors since they have had to face learning about new technological tools, living with the various behaviors that students may present in this environment, among other common situations in this modality. Therefore, by realizing these factors, the practice seems to be more interesting and it is sought to determine the level of happiness of the instructors in this environment.

The practice appears to be simple, but it can be adapted to find different ways to enhance it, one of them is to be able to quantify the results obtained (such as information radars) to obtain the degree of happiness of a team.

I invite you to know the 12 steps to happiness from the Management 3.0 page https://management30.com/practice/happiness-steps/

The practice was experienced through the Miro tool, where a design of the 12 steps to happiness was used so that quantitatively the level of happiness was obtained for each member of the team, and later the average of the same was generated to determine the degree of team happiness, as well as actions they can take at the lowest points.

The dynamics to execute the practice consisted of the following steps:

1. Each member determines the value from 0 to 5 in which she considers her level of happiness for each of the 12 steps.

2. The summation of the results obtained in the 12 steps of happiness is made for each participant.

3. The percentage of happiness of each participant is determined according to the rule of 3.

4. The average happiness value of the team is generated according to the data obtained and the number of team members.

5. Team members discuss actions they can take to improve their happiness.

Exercise considerations:

The percentage is determined taking into account that 100% is equivalent to 60 points (12 steps for the maximum value that is 5).

As a facilitator, I learned that dynamics are of great interest when participants have little or no context of what they can achieve by making them aware of the importance of these 12 elements.

The team that participated in the practice was amazed at how they can quantify in a very simple way the happiness that currently exists in addition to understanding that this depends on factors such as the situation that each person is experiencing, it is important to mention that, in this exercise, One of the most outstanding qualities will be empathy as a team towards the other members.

My next experiment with this practice will be to add references, for example: Add an estimate to the step of happiness “rest”, taking into account an adequate average of time, since for each person it will be different how they experience this activity, maybe 6 hours for a person may be good, but for someone else, it is not like that and requires a greater rest. In this same example, it will be important to have a statistic on rest that is applicable in the context or culture of the place, this could help to interpret each of the steps so that an ideal perspective of the weighting according to the score can be obtained. Each member assigns you to each step of happiness.

With the results of this experiment the team obtained:

• Knowledge of what are the weak points of each step to the happiness of each instructor of the team, which supports the taking of actions to improve.

• Support to improve empathy between the team instructors since there were cases where the situations that each instructor is experiencing were unknown, for example, the fact of not being able to have a good rest due to extra activities that they are doing and which is Unknown to two of the instructors.

Within the team’s feedback, tips were shared, as well as ideas to feel more secure despite the complications that have happened or may happen. The team concludes that the important thing will be to keep trying to improve until achieving the goal, of taking teaching to different levels, finally it was commented that having an evaluation of happiness helps you to take care of the steps where you are weaker because without happiness the equipment cannot be kept energized.

I invite you to do this practice for yourself, with your group of friends, or with a work team, it can be useful to execute at any time, however, I recommend doing it when the team starts a new adventure (project or initiative), do an evaluation along the way that can be at some key moment (in some setback or defined period) and generate a final evaluation at the end of their activities with which they can have a photo of the behavior of the same during a whole period.