How could we measure Team Happiness?

Do you believe that what you measure you will get?  If so you want to start to measure team happiness.  So what techniques do we have to measure something so ephemeral?

This TED Talk by Dominic Price lays out a simple and insightful guide to assess your happiness.

The health care industry has studied measuring pain and have very good data on their ability to measure and administer pain drugs upon a subjective self report.  Maybe we could do the same in knowledge worker teams and work groups.

Team Happiness Net Promoter Score sheet

Here's a riff upon the classic Net Promoter Score for measuring team happiness.

 "How likely is it that you would recommend our team to a trusted friend that is looking for a job?"

To calculate the NPS - the continuum is divided into 3 groups; the detractors (1 - 6), the passive (7 & 8), the promoters (9 & 10).  The passive are ignored - they do not promote your objective.  The NET promoter score is the percentage of people promoting your objective minus the percentage of people detracting from your objective.

     NPS = Promoter % - Detractor %  (valid range +100% to -100%)

How does this objective of promoting your team as a recommendation for a friend seeking a job a proxy for team happiness?  I've not met many good people that would shaft a friend by recommending an unhappy team - have you?

Note:  with small populations (like a scrum team) there is high variability based upon a few people's scoring,  another companion metric would be the percentage of people participating in the survey.  Did the whole team play - or do you have a core group that is the in-group?

See Also:

NPS on Wikipedia

Visualizing Agility: Agile Metrics that Matter by Jay Packlick