The Niko-Niko calendar, a fun and effective team management tool

Good project management is not just about organization and planning. Our tip? Measure your team’s mood regularly to improve the way you work together and make teamwork more effective.

Do you know what Niko means in Japanese? Smile! The Niko-Niko calendar is an agile method that everyone can use to say how they feel about their working day, may it be in person or in remote work.

The last thing they do each evening is choose a color to represent their day:

• Green for happy
• Yellow for neutral
• Red for unhappy

At a glance, the team can see a pattern based on the dominant color.

Is there some red in the table? The manager can set a one-on-one with the employees concerned, or individuals can directly give feedback to the group to solve a mutual problem. In short, the aim is to improve team productivity in a way that keeps everyone happy and facilitate team management.

The Niko-Niko calendar helps you to improve teamwork

An important aspect of teamwork is looking after the group as a whole, and that means the individual team members too. Often, in meetings or workshops, you can take the team's temperature, but you don’t really know how individuals are feeling. Some employees might feel unhappy or have suggestions or comments for the team management.

The Niko-Niko Calendar is an invaluable indicator and visual management tool that the team can use face-to-face or in remote work, to check in every day, detect the slightest hiccup at a glance and intervene quickly.

Team management means learning to work with people, not just tools or software. Research shows that happy employees are more productive than unhappy employees in the long term.

In fact, when an employee encounters a problem they can't solve, they feel unproductive and frustrated. Sometimes, even the employee would not directly relate this problem to their general state of mind at that moment, and then may need help in identifying it. If not, this could impact not only their individual work, but also the work and morale of their team.

By measuring a team’s mood, the project manager can unearth issues that are stopping it from moving forward. Asking for visual feedback on the morale of the team members then can allow to better manage it.

How to manage a team effectively with the Niko-Niko calendar

Start by inviting your team on Board, Klaxoon's online whiteboard, customized with the Niko-Niko Calendar.

If need be, familiarize the members with the various Board's options. The Niko-Niko Calendar Template will become their daily companion, at the office or in remote work. So, your employees need to know how to use it. They can put their mood or ideas on it themselves, quiz other team members using the Question tool and report any difficulties or urgent problems in the early warning area.

Before starting the session, ask your team members to post a picture representing them on the Board, and choose a calendar row, then explain to them how it works.

At the end of their work day, each team member logs into the whiteboard and notes their mood. They just copy the corresponding smiley face and then place it in the box for that day, next to their photo.

• A green smiling face shows that they are happy after a hassle-free, productive and fun day.
• A neutral yellow face shows that the day was normal, with nothing to flag.
• An unhappy red face indicates that they are upset, or worried about something that happened that day.

No need toset up a specific meeting for this, the Niko-Niko calendar will soon become an end of workday ritual for the group, to be completed asynchronously. This team management tool can be used to improve teamwork and look after team members individually too!