Happy and enthusiastic workers are not just productive workers but also the most loyal ones. But how does that happen? It happens through the five organizational spontaneities (as defined by a veteran and expert of organizational psychology, Daniel Katz:) helping co-workers, protecting the organization, making constructive suggestions, developing oneself, and spreading goodwill. Katz believed that high positive mood points (or momentary affect) can directly trigger organizational spontaneities.
The mood and the discrete emotions of the employees also actively Influence cognitive performance and flexibility: consequently improving performance and task completion rates.
British research in collaboration with Oxford University found that happy workers are 13% more productive. Even at the maximum macro level, it can be seen that the happiest nations are the most productive ones. Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, and the Netherlands made the top 10 list for both the highest GDP per hour worked and the Happiness index.
Considering the major role of mood and emotions in determining productivity, it is integral for all organizations to develop a deeper understanding of moods and emotions at the workplace.
However, be prepared for things to get a little complicated–after all, it's human emotions. We are never just happy or just sad. Human emotions are always layered!
Imagine, at work, you are being asked, "how are you feeling?" Now, all the feelings you experience at that moment are your momentary affect for that moment. This is why momentary affect is often described as the feelings experienced at the moment. However, in certain scenarios, momentary affect can indicate an entire (and a broader) phenomenon. The phenomenon of an employee's emotional reactions to workplace events, and how their emotion determines their behavioral and attitudinal outcomes. Two major categories of momentary affect are moods and discrete emotions.
Moods are temporary but long-lasting. As compared to discrete emotions they are much diffused and are not directed at specific events. For instance, feeling enthusiastic, excited, calm, confident, nervous, or tense is a mood. It is also possible for people to feel two complementary moods simultaneously, for example, calm and confident, or enthusiastic and confident. But, it is not possible to feel two contradictory mood points simultaneously, for example, Calm and excited, or confident and nervous.
The mood is actually what brings layers to emotions. Two people at a workplace can be happy, yet both can behave entirely differently–this is because they are at different mood points. Understanding how mood and emotion interact with each other to determine the employee's final behavioral and attitudinal outcome is of consequential importance.
Discrete emotions are core emotions that every human being is capable of exhibiting, irrespective of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and so on. The discrete emotions are often triggered by specific events and can have a dependency on the prevalent mood. The core discrete emotions are anger, fear, disgust, guilt, envy, shame, surprise, sadness, trust, pride, hope, relief, gratitude, and happiness. Note, that, unlike mood, individuals can experience only one discrete emotion at a given moment.
Just knowing your employee's emotions is not enough. It will not help you get sufficient managerial insights. You might have noticed that most of your employees are experiencing joy (or happiness) yet your team productivity is low. Well, perhaps most of the employees aren't enthusiastic enough about the work they are doing.
The mood of your employees defines the nature of the discrete emotions they are experiencing. Identifying the nature of the emotions will help you get key insights for managing the tasks for your employees.
The three different emotional characteristics are valence, arousal, and dominance.
Now that we have established what mood is, and how it can impact productivity. Let's focus on tracking mood.
Daily Mood tracking refers to systematically observing the dominant moods in your team on a regular basis. There are three specific purposes for this observation:
There are different daily mood tracker ideas for tracking mood. But, the most effective daily mood tracker template includes conducting a daily survey on your employees, asking about their mood at work. Maintain a digital journal of the responses and compile them into monthly or weekly mood tracker reports for observing trends and patterns.
If this seems like a tedious job to you, then find out which is the best free mood tracker app and get it for your team. The best mood check app can conveniently schedule daily mood tracking surveys for your employees. Your best free mood tracker app should also be able to automatically collect the responses and maintain a database. And, finally, your mood check app should be able to generate weekly or monthly mood tracker reports.
Traditionally, most daily mood tracker ideas are implemented during stand up meetings. However, for more accurate tracking you can also schedule the app to track mood and energy at the mid-day and at the end of the day.
Our mood points have a great hold over our behavior and attitude. And, the biochemical nature of moods is such that the negative affects exhibit a much more powerful hold over us than the positive affects.
The biological construct of moods is such that, even when a worker tries to fight against a negative mood by consciously keeping a positive attitude–the negative affects will have a greater chance of winning over. And, a negative mood has ill-repute of triggering depression & anxiety, and dampening cognitive performance & flexibility.
This means if your workers are in a negative mood, irrespective of their determination and will, their performance will suffer.
So if you are wondering what is the point of mood tracking—know, that the daily mood tracker ideas happen to be the only logical solutions to systematically eliminating the causes of negative moods and saving employers billions of dollars.
The best free mood tracker app will generate multiple actionable benefits to tackle & manage negative moods in a workplace:
Sup Bot is a Slack bot that can act as a daily stand up planner with mood tracker. It essentially automates daily stand ups & sprint check-in followups to avoid unnecessary meetings. SUP’s primary instruments include—the questionnaire surveys, which make Sup an effective Slack tool for all four inspect and adapt scrum events.
Sup can schedule these surveys on any number of days and at any time, preferred by the user. Users can also schedule multiple surveys throughout the day.
These surveys can have task-related questions, mood tracker, and mood-tracking questions.
Sup allows users to limitlessly customize the survey questionnaires; write their own questions and add any number of questions. The questionnaires can also be saved as templates, and later used while scheduling surveys.
The responses collected by Sup are stored, which can be edited and updated by the users at any time. The bot can also help users generate CSV reports and timesheets from the collected responses. The reports can be specific to surveys, dates, and users.
Finally, the feature that matters the most in this blog is mood-tracking. Mood-tracking on Sup is extremely simple. Tracking mood doesn’t need any additional effort on SUP. While scheduling your stand up or followup surveys, simply enable the mood-tracking option–and Sup does the rest. While conducting the survey, Sup will ask users “How are you feeling today” with relevant mood response options. Sup will anonymously store the mood responses submitted by your employees. And, compile the responses using a powerful BI tool [Draxlr](https://www.draxlr.com/), into graphs & charts representing your team’s average mood for a week or a month. Sup can also send you a weekly or monthly mood tracker report.
Mood-tracking is usually enabled for stand up surveys, or end-of-day update surveys. However, if you want to have a deeper understanding of your team’s mood points and patterns—you will need to build a thorough mood tracker template. A template that will conduct both daily mood-tracking and dedicated mood surveys asking deeper mood-related questions. In this case, to come up with useful questions, you will need some understanding of mood and discrete emotions—as we discussed at the very beginning of this blog.
10 Questions to include in dedicated mood-tracking surveys:
Amidst tracking tasks and managing sprints, team mood often takes a backseat. That definitely should not be the case. Without considering the team mood implications, you will never get the management measures right. Mood-tracking provides invaluable insights for sprint planning. Get Sup for your Slack team and track their daily emotions, without any additional hassle.
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