The Happiness Door is dead! Long live The Happiness Door!
After gathering a large amount of feedback over how The Happiness Door works, we’ve made a few changes to the form. The details on how it works can be found in the above blog post, but if you’d like to know more about the feedback we received and how we decided on the current format, read on!
After soliciting feedback from a number of avenues, we ended up with the following feedback about The Happiness Door, as it existed:
Pros
- Opportunity to look back on last week is useful
- Useful to have a place to go when your direct report isn’t helpful/is the issue
- Nice to have somewhere to submit feedback and know it’ll be seen
- Concept of getting feedback and getting an overall temp of the org is sound
Cons
- Results are not visible to everyone
- Easy to forget it exists
- Anonymity means some use it to vent rather than submit actionable feedback
- A lot of feedback would be better served in one on ones or retros/public forums
- A blank text entry without guiding questions is intimidating and hard to fill out
- Purpose of the form is too broad/not clear
- Get the feeling feedback is not viewed/addressed
While most appreciated the Happiness Door existing, most people found it just wasn’t as effective at what it was intended for, and furthermore, what it was intended for was often unclear.
In order to clear this up, we narrowed the scope of the Happiness Door and sought to be more open about the results. While this eliminates fully anonymous feedback, that feedback was perhaps the least useful feedback we received (it was rarely actionable as we did not know where to focus our efforts) and was the source of a lot of uncertainty as to the purpose of the Happiness Door. Instead, we’d like to open the results up to the entire team. Not only does this foster some discussion about important points, it allows everyone on the team to see what the leadership team sees and how they’ll address specific pieces of feedback.
We recommend any feedback that you don’t feel comfortable submitting via this avenue go to your team lead in a one on one. If that isn’t possible for any reason, you can always request a one on one with any other team lead at any time. If the team still finds they need an anonymous avenue for feedback, let us know and we’ll put together a separate tool to keep the purpose of the Happiness Door more focused.
We also changed the generic feedback question to three more focused items to help prompt specific feedback. All three are optional, so you can add as much or as little as you’d like. Feedback will be shared in #team-banno each week, usually on Monday or Tuesday.
And as always, any process changes we make are open to feedback! So far, this new version of the Happiness Door was created based on feedback from the team and approved by the Leadership team. If anything here seems off to you, don’t hesitate to speak up in #team-banno. Now go forth, and submit your feedback to The Happiness Door!