Niko-Niko Calender — Pros & Cons

What is a Niko-Niko Calendar?

A Niko-Niko calendar is a  visual, iconic tool to track the mood of a team — aka of monitoring of a Happiness Index. You set up a calendar template. Each team member records her mood after each working day with a smiley.

Nikoniko means in Japanese "smiling".

There are even commercial tools for people and happiness analysis:  The-Happiness-Index.com, Niko Niko App Win10 (Microsoft), Team happiness report (Infoware Studios), Niko Calendar Jira.

Pros & Cons of Niko-Niko Calendars

Pros:

• Niko-Niko Calendars are a simple tool for employees to record their personal mood.
• Employees feel recognized and valued.
• Scrum masters or management can track team emotions easily.

There are some Cons:

• Employees could see posting smileys as being in a Kindergarten.
• Emotions are individually different sensations. You can not generalize them or reduce them to a numerical scale of 1-5, or (+, —,  neutral).
• Do not use individual emotions like happiness to assess or evaluate individual employee performance.

Further Reading

• Sakata Akinori: Niko-Niko Calendar. Jan. 4, 2006.
• Agile Alliance: What is a Niko-Niko Calendar.
• Sabrina Son: Why a Niko-Niko Calendar Kills Workplace Morale. TINYpulse, May 10, 2016.
• Bernd Schiffer: How to Track the Team’s Mood with a Niko-Niko Calendar. Sept. 12, 2011.