Niko-Niko(smiley) Calendar for people engagement
Recently I did Management 3.0 fundamental workshop and it was a great learning experience, I learn the values and Principles of Management 3.0 with activities and games, and one of the points focuses on engaging people and their interactions. In this blog, I will share my experience with Niko-Niko Calendar with my Team.
What is Niko-Niko Calendar?
Niko is a Japanese word and the meaning of Niko is “Smile” or we can say Smiley Calendar which is a tool to monitor a team’s happiness index by making a Visual board or the term’s “mood board” we can also manage this online on a shared sheet as well.
Generally, team members are updating their “how was your day” information daily on the wall, by just placing the smiley like Awesome day 😎, Good day 😀, not so Good Day 😐, Horrible day 🙄 and discuss or share the experience.
How to use Niko-Niko:
To use the Niko-Niko Calendar you just need a while board, Sheet of paper or you can even manage in the spreadsheet as well. In the grid just write down all team member’s names vertically and add Calendar days horizontally as shown in the below screen.
The rule is very simple, just need to ask the team member How was your day yesterday/Today? And team member will pick up a Smiley and place that against their name and day. Then they discuss how they feel or what is the reason behind choosing the smiley. once the team is familiar with the activities and discussion, you will find this funny and very interactive.
How we used the Niko-Niko calendar with Team?
So I Introduce the Niko-Niko Calendar and takes the buy-in from the team, as we follow agile scrum we asked the team to update and discuss this after daily scrum as all members are there it will be easy to update and discuss. so the very first day I asked them and they choose the smiley and I update the sheet and asked them to update the next day.
The next day all members have updated their day and Smiley and we discussed with each member and I asked them to do they want to continue to do this activity? and the reply was a big YES. so daily team meeting, we have updated our mood and discussed with the team members. the day we started, we just used a plane template, but from the next day one team member place a beautiful smiley to make this more interactive and we got very good feedback and bed day as well. we are working remotely at that time so few experience team shares like Power cut issue – Horrible day, Deployment is done before time – Awesome day, etc. you can see some example below.
after one sprint team place one Graph as well so we can calcualte average happiness of the team.
Later we have started writing comments and reasons for the day as per the below example. you can see here I have an awesome day as we have deployed the application successfully.
Overall we found this very helpful in terms of team bonding, understanding each other as a team, knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, engaging people, and cocreating work.
To use the Google sheet with your remote team you can use the .xlsx file here. for more information you can check the rules here.
