Niko Niko - Mood Tracking for Teams

Back to Niko Niko At Niko Niko we make tracking mood data easy and engaging. Based on the agile software development methodology of the same name, Niko Niko is an app that enables teams of people to track mood or sentiment in reaction to activities and objectives.

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New Report Provides Valuable Insights About Mood, Productivity, and Collaboration

For our regular readers, it is likely no surprise that a growing body of research supports what we have been suggesting all along: mood has a direct impact on productivity, and negativity can severely undermine the productivity of your workplace. Several of our posts have touched on this subject, and here are just a few to consider:

Niko Niko Calendars: Benefits and Challenges to Tracking Moods

Employee Engagement: Researchers Find Link Between Happiness and Productivity

Increasing Positive Emotion at Work

Mood vs. Emotion

Happiness Hacking: Tips to Happier Work and Life: Have a Halloween Party! 

Now, we have additional data to add, in the form of a revealing study conducted by Noel Radley over at Software Advice™, a company that reviews and compares online project management technology. The study reports the findings of a survey conducted among 1,552 adults regarding their observations of negative emotions in the workplace, and the impact these observations had on their own moods and performances.

Frequency of Perceived Negative Emotions From Co-Workers

Here are just a few of the highlights the report provides regarding the observation of negativity in the workplace: 

84% of respondents stated they observed a co-worker who was exhibiting negative emotions, such as anger or frustration, in the workplace

34% of the respondents indicated that these observations were made “regularly,” while another 29% stated they were occasional

73% of respondents had seen such emotions exhibited by managers

Only 14% cited these types of behaviors occurring in managers “regularly,” with 35% stating that it had happened only “rarely”

The report goes on to explain that, upon self-evaluation, a majority of respondents (75%, in fact) felt that the negative emotions they observed impacted their mood and productivity. The impact tended to vary per respondent, with 21% saying it would have a “significant impact” on mood and 24% indicating a “significant impact” on productivity.   

There are many other significant findings and explanations in the report, such as “group mood,” perceived responsibility for negative emotions, and the role of management in influencing emotion in the workplace. If you are concerned about mood and productivity in your office, or even simply want to know more about how your behavior and actions might be impacting your co-workers, it is definitely worth an in-depth read-through for some valuable insights (see link at the bottom of the page!).

How Niko Niko Can Help

So, if mood and productivity are inextricably linked, and management can have a significant impact on employee’s emotions, what are some of the solutions companies can implement for enhancing mood and thereby enjoying increased productivity?

We here at Niko Niko have been working hard on one particular means for generating a solution: mood-tracking.

We’ve discussed the importance of having data close at hand and utilizing people metrics to improve your organization. But, to summarize: it is difficult to improve what you cannot adequately measure. A system like Niko Niko provides a means of tracking and recording the moods of your team members. The benefits of such a system are manifold: 

Establish a baseline to see what the general mood of your team or organization is right now.

See which activities generate what types of moods in your team members.

Assess individual team member moods on a regular basis to identify individuals who may be struggling and take appropriate action, including providing support and counseling as needed.

Propose and implement solutions and see how these solutions impact the incoming mood data; then, obtain additional feedback to adjust these solutions as needed.

Having the data at-hand is just one step in the process, but knowing where your organization stands and being able to evaluate your improvements on an ongoing basis can be valuable, whether you are facing a significant problem with morale or simply want to fine-tune your work environment to increase employee satisfaction and facilitate productivity.

What insights do you take away from the Software Advice™ study? How would you utilize mood data in your organization for the benefit of your company and your employees? Share with us in the comments!

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Can Real-Time Emotion Data Help Coaching Scale?

A coach is a valuable resource to any individual or organization. Some of the primary benefits of coaching include:

  Mentoring. You may be able to connect with a coach who has done what you want to do, thus giving you an opportunity to learn from experience.

Accountability. A coach will keep you on track and ensure you are making real progress towards your goals.

Motivation. Coaches can provide you with the right kind of motivation, when you need it: tough love, sympathy, or a pep talk when required.

Advice. You will sometimes run into situations you do not know how to navigate; having someone with which to bounce around ideas and get feedback can be a valuable asset.

All of this might sound great, but there can sometimes be a catch to coaching: how do you scale it across an organization so that everyone benefits?

A successful coach will usually try to connect with people on an individual basis, thus being able to deliver the most impact by tailoring their approaches to each person’s needs. However, this can turn into a problem when trying to scale: how does a coach deliver the same kinds of benefits to hundreds or thousands of people versus just a handful?

One answer has been through workshops, seminars, and speeches. Department- or company-wide sessions can be effective to an extent, though there are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. Not everyone may need all of the materials or ideas presented during a broader workshop, meaning that time and resources are being used inefficiently where some individuals are concerned. Furthermore, one of the big benefits of coaching is being able to custom tailor what a coach brings to your business, based on what you need. That benefit gets diluted when you try to scale it through larger seminars.

Instead of trying to make coaching scale via expanding its reach, what if instead companies focused on concentrating coaching on those who need it the most?

There are a few ways to accomplish this:

1)   Ask employees directly. Some might state they are interested in working with a coach, while others might decline if they feel their performance would not benefit. While imperfect – after all, you might disagree about who needs coaching and who does not – this can start to give you a feel for who might be more receptive to coaching, and thus focus your efforts on where it will be more effective, with willing participants.

2)   Conduct evaluations. Can management use prior performance reviews and other data to see where coaching might be most effective? Top performers might benefit from on-going motivation, while struggling employees could benefit from having someone advise them and help them hone their skills. Having these kinds of goals in mind might help you pinpoint who in your organization would benefit the most.

3)   Use real-time emotion data. By collecting data through a program like Niko Niko, you might get a more objective measure as to who needs coaching and who does not.

Real-time emotion data can help on a few of different levels.

Customizing content. By having a feel for how an employee is doing and feeling in advance, a coach can prepare for a session more efficiently, thus being able to deliver benefits to more employees.

Aggregating content. If a coach finds that certain clusters of employees are following certain emotional trends, it can help group those employees together who might need similar coaching support, making for smaller and more intimate workshops and sessions while still catering to the group as a whole.

Follow up. By continuing to follow emotional trends throughout the coaching cycle, it can help identify who needs more follow-up and whether certain coaching techniques are effective.

How would having access to continuous emotional data from coaching clients help you with scaling your coaching efforts throughout a larger organization?

Image via creative commons courtesy of Laughlin Elkind

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Soft Skills Matter in IT

(Note from Niko Niko: The following is a guest post from Ben Linders, sharing his insights with us on the benefits of cultivating an Agile team that has soft skills in addition to the technical skills that are often highly valued in the IT world! Enjoy!)

IT is viewed by many people as being something technical. They have a vision of managers with lots of plans, documents and spreadsheets, and nerds that are sitting behind their computer doing the “real work”.  It may be out there, but I don’t see that often. Software development is done by real people like you and me. People who have feelings. They want to work in teams, be successful together, and have fun :-).

I see people who work together in agile teams to deliver working software solutions, which help their customers to do their daily work, and deliver business value to the company. Communication and collaboration is essential to make the people that are doing this successful. So for me, soft skills really matter in IT!

Teamwork

I see every day how Soft Skills can make the difference between teams that are successful, and those who have problems. The ability to communicate, collaborate, reflect and give feedback, and continuously improve the way of working is crucial for team members to deliver value to their customers. They enable teams to work in a sustainable pace.

Soft skills help to discuss and solve issues that come up, and get rid of anything that frustrates team members. It is more fun to work in such a team, and yes, you can even measure how happy your professionals are with the Happiness Metric.

The evidence is there

What convinces me that soft skills really matter? My Experiences! Most of the Root Causes that I have found when examining defects or project problems have to do with knowledge and soft skills. In the agile retrospectives that I facilitate, people discuss how they communicate, collaborate, and look for strengths in those areas that can be used to further increase team performance.

Books like Peopleware and The Mythical Man Month make sense. Methods from the positive psychology, like Solution Focus, Theory U, and Appreciative Inquiry have evidence that recognizing and developing soft skills makes a difference (see my Golden Rules for Agile Process Improvement).

The People-CMM, an accompanying model for the CMMI, has a level 2 process area on Communication and Coordination and can be used to empower your people. 

For me, this is enough evidence that soft skills matter in IT!

Improving team skills

As a strong believer in soft skills I also look for ways to help people and teams to improve them. Some of the exercises I do when designing valuable agile retrospectives are 1 word exercises and happiness measurements. (A full description of the exercises that I use can be found in the book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.)

In a 1 word retrospective, you do a team member check-in by asking them to use one word that summarizes how they are feeling. Chances are big that at one or more of these words, with some questioning, triggers a discussion where things are spoken out about the team that often don’t reach the surface.

With a happiness index retrospective, you can visualize and explore team emotions. Often these emotions are directly related to the individual and team performance. And of course they play a role in the well being of people. In the retrospective, team members will use sticky notes to state their emotions during the iteration, both negative and positive. The facilitator helps the team to discuss their feelings and underlying causes, and to agree what they can do differently in the next iteration to increase the team's happiness and performance.

What is your experience? 

Do you agree that soft skills matter in IT? Have you seen the benefits when professionals improved their soft skills? Is it worth investing time and money to make it possible that people can develop themselves? Please share your experiences!

Note: An earlier version of the blog has been posted on May 3, 2013: Do Soft Skills Really Matter in IT? 

Ben Linders is a Senior Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Process Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality. 

As an advisor, coach and trainer he helps organizations by deploying effective software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers.

Ben is an active member of several networks on Agile, Lean and Quality, and a frequent speaker and writer. He shares his experience in a bilingual blog (Dutch and English) and as an editor for Agile at InfoQ. You can find him on twitter: @BenLinders.

 [phone]  [email protected]  @BenLinders  Ben Linders  Ben Linders Advies  Tilburg, The Netherlands

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Increasing Employee Engagement: Are Coaches the Answer?

In our last post, we discussed the importance of employee engagement at work and how low engagement truly is in most workplaces. We have also talked about ways to analyze and improve engagement through tools such as PERMA, and through building companies that are focused on people first.

  These tools and concepts are all well and good, but in order to implement them, a company requires people who are comfortable taking action: asking the right questions of their employees, taking a look at the data, developing solutions based on that data, and then implementing a plan to facilitate change.

Looking around, can you spot people in your company who can perform each of these action items? If so, you are headed in the right direction. If not, then you may need help to move forward. Niko Niko is a company with tools meant to help businesses bridge this gap, which we will discuss more in the future. However, you may be able to get started by using a coach or a specialist.

Types of Coaches

If this idea intrigues you, you may start searching around and see that there are actually a lot of coaching services available. Should you hire a corporate coach? An executive coach? A life coach? Well, it depends on what kind of change you want to drive in your organization.

Some coaches focus on individual needs and career development, while others tend to take a company-wide focus. Does the change need to occur throughout your entire organization, or would just a few people at the top benefit from having a coach? Are you trying to pinpoint and cultivate top performers that you feel have great potential? Or are you attempting to motivate employees in order to maximize profits and productivity?

One caveat: corporate coaching differs from life coaching, and it is also not a substitute for psychological help. Corporate coaching also differs from other training methodologies, in that it is not a one-off event. Coaching is an on-going process. While the areas that corporate coaching covers are often interlinked with other areas, the primary purpose of corporate coaching is to help recipients achieve excellence and enhanced business performance.

Examples of Coaching Services

There are a number of people and coaching services available serving a variety of needs. Here is an overview of a few common practices:

1) Delivering Happiness. This coaching service focuses on fulfilling the need people have to feel like part of something “bigger than themselves.” Through “prioritizing happiness in work and life,” this service seeks to drive change in individuals and companies by finding and pursuing passions and purpose.

2) The Energy Project. The Energy Project wants to address the growing issue of disengagement by reducing the time spent tethered to digital devices, and by fulfilling employee’s core needs so they are better able to deliver at work.

3) Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. The approach taken at SIYLI is based on research developed at Google, and focuses on emotional intelligence and mindfulness. It trains people on techniques needed for leadership and peak performance.

There are many other philosophies, methodologies, and people associated with coaching, but these are some of the more popular available. What coaching services have you used? What was most successful?

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The Cost of Low Employee Engagement: How Much is Your Business Losing?

A major epidemic is causing businesses throughout the United States to throw billions of dollars out the window.

It isn’t “sick days” or skyrocketing insurance costs. It doesn’t have to do with taxes or creeping overhead, either.

It all revolves around how engaged your employees are while they are on the job. 

Before you get inspired to go take a walk around and see what your employees are up to as opposed to being engaged in work-related tasks, know that you are not the only one suffering from this issue:

In Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace” survey, roughly 70% of respondents indicated they were “disengaged” or “actively disengaged” from their work.

The survey polled 350,000 respondents and took place over a period of three years.

When broken down into subcategories, the survey found that women were generally more engaged than men, and remote workers were more engaged than on-site workers.

Less than half (in fact, only 41%) of employees felt that they had a grasp on what the company they work for stands for and how the brand differs from its competition.

In total, Gallup issued an estimate stating that the cost of these disengaged employees runs U.S. businesses in the neighborhood of $450 billion to $550 billion per year due to lost productivity. The following factors contribute:

These workers are more likely to steal from the companies they work for;

Negativity in the workplace spreads easily, leading to loss of productivity from other team members;

Disengaged workers are more likely to use paid time off, even if the time off does not fall within the purview of designated excuses;

Disengaged workers tend to negatively influence customer acquisition and retention.

On the other hand, having engaged employees can nearly double the odds of a business achieving success as measured by finances, talent retention, and customer satisfaction. Why? Because engagement is directly related to productivity.

Aside from productivity, engagement is also important when your business is looking to grow. Have you ever heard of the Pareto Principle? It is also sometimes referred to as the 80/20 Rule. It generally states that 80% of the results can be attributed to 20% of the population. This goes for innovation, new customers, new revenue, and the like. If you look carefully, you might see this trend emerge in your own organization. How many employees are responsible for how much of your bottom line and organizational results?

Also, remember this post from just a few months ago? To summarize: a study revealed that happy and rewarded employees were able to outperform control groups who received no rewards. Both clinical data and subjective data from interviews revealed that performance between these two types of groups can differ by as much as 12%. 

Throughout the next several weeks, we will be looking at the relationships between engagement, productivity, and success, and examining the ways employers and employees can increase engagement. 

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Guide: How to Use Niko Niko

Hi, I’m Max, the CEO of Niko Niko. I’ve received a lot of inquiries about how to use Niko Niko in different environments. I’ve prepared this quick guide to cover FAQs and successful use cases that we’ve seen.

Niko Niko is a rapidly evolving product that allows you to easily collect, analyze, and act on emotional data. As an early stage startup, we’re experimenting constantly and have seen many of our customers using Niko Niko in unexpected, but effective and exciting ways. In this note, I’m going to lay out some of the most common use cases and questions that you can use or adapt to suit your needs.

The most fundamental differences in use case are:

A) Open vs. Closed

Some tight-knit teams love logging moods that everyone else in the organization can see. This is particularly popular in the agile and distributed software development communities. Many of our larger customers (and some smaller as well) use Niko Niko anonymously so that managers only see aggregate level pulse for their team. We’re still beta testing anonymity, but if you’re interested in setting up an anonymous team, please shoot me an email at [email protected].

B) Collection Method

Currently, every account defaults to sending prompts via email. Once in email, users respond to the emotional question with 1 click (we’re using a text scale in email because it’s easier to load in different browser/mail client configurations.) We plan to offer images soon.

Other methods of collection include the iOS app and Chrome extension. We’re still beta testing both, but I encourage all users to try them out and give us feedback.

Once you’ve set up your Niko Niko account, the big questions we get are: A) what should I ask? and B) what do I do with that information? We’re currently working with some of the world’s top coaches and psychologists to deliver pre-crafted questions and content on top of Niko Niko. If you’re interested in piloting with one of these coaches, please shoot me an email ([email protected]). I’ve also prepared a list of some of the most effective and common uses cases and question sets below.

1) Regular Employee Pulse

The most basic use case for Niko Niko is to ask all employees a single daily question: “how do you feel?” or “how do you feel about x?” Many of our customers ask this daily question to get a quick temperature check on the company at large, to identify who might need some extra attention (if used openly), and to determine who’s disengaged enough to not log Nikos at all (again, if used openly).

2)  Employee Thriving

We’re big fans of thriving as a measure of employee success. Thriving is basically composed of energy level and opportunity for learning. You can read more about Christne Porath’s work on thriving here.

How energetic do you feel? (1 or 2x daily)

How do you feel about personal growth you made this week? (1x late in week)  

3) Progress

We’re also keen on progress as a key measure of personal and company success. You can use these questions to map employee understandings of priorities and how successful they were in achieving them. You can read more about Teresa Amabile’s work on progress here.

How do you feel about progress you made today? Note anything impeding your progress. (1x daily)

How clearly do you understand your priorities for the week? (1x early in week)

How do you feel about progress you made on your priorities for the week? (1x late in week)

3) On-boarding

A new employee’s first several weeks on the job are perhaps the most critical for long-term success and cultural impact. Use weekly questions like the example below to measure how well a new employee’s perception of your culture matches what he or she was promised.

How well does the company’s culture match your expectations? (1x week for 6-8 weeks)

4) Customer Temperature / Net Promoter Score

Although we’re currently focused on employee engagement, we’ve seen several customers use Niko Niko successfully for customer temperature readings.

How do you feel about the quality of communication between you and [the provider company]?

How do you feel about recommending the product or service to a friend?

Chris Schultz has prepared an excellent walk-through of how he uses Niko Niko to gauge customer satisfaction at Flat Stack, his software development company.

5) Employee Net Promoter Score

This is a simple use case to run semi-frequently (e.g. monthly) to see how likely an employee is to recommend working at your company to a friend or how likely they are to recommend your product or service to a friend.

How do you feel about recommending that your friend work at your company?

How do you feel about recommending your company’s product or service to your friends?

6) Company Specific Initiatives

We’ve seen companies use Niko Niko for set time periods to chart progress on specific initiatives. E.g. a team focused on a 30 day mindfulness or gratitude challenge might ask a daily question to rate how people feel after conducting their practice. We’ve also seen companies use Niko Niko for real-time A/B testing to see what sorts of actions and messages resonate best with employees.

This is just a sampling of the ways that folks are using Niko Niko. Soon, more options (complete with associated content aimed at improving employee morale, energy, or workplace satisfaction) will be available from top coaches and psychologists. Please let me know how you’re using Niko Niko, any ideas you have for interesting use cases, or if you’d like a personal consultation to adapt the product for your company.

  - Max

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What to do with all of the Data in Your Organization

We’ve been talking about big data and quantified self in the context of workplace experiments for the last several weeks. We’ve discussed a bit about what you should track, how you should track it, and what skills you need to manage the data that’s coming in. Now, to complete the circle, we need to discuss what to do with all of the data you have gathered.

There are a couple of analyses you need to make right away:

1)   What questions are you trying to answer with the data you have gathered?

2)   Did you gather the right data for what you are trying to accomplish?

Asking the Right Questions

Narrowing down your questions involves going back and looking at your ultimate goals. An easy area to use as an example is marketing. If your goal is to find customers, then you want to use your collected data to determine who your most likely customers are going to be. Is there a trend between the customers you have already accumulated?

After formulating a hypothesis based on these goals and questions, you will need to analyze your data to determine if your hypothesis is correct. Do you even have the right data for answering these questions? One of the big issues with big data is that it is virtually unlimited: you need to sift through everything that is out there to find the data that is relevant to your specific query.

Managing Data

Text-based data is highly useful in one respect: it provides a wealth of detail about the data you have collected. It can present nuances, exceptions, and can often even explain why a particular piece of data is what it is. However, in a world where there are millions and billions of pieces of data being transmitted in any given moment, it is also usually impractical.

Fortunately, there are other ways to use and compile data, through data visualization. This process takes the data collected and puts it into a format that can be read with a few glances. It might take the form of a pie chart, a bar graph, or any of a number of visual representations that have emerged in recent years.

The idea behind visualization is nothing new. The emergence of the infographic craze is just one manifestation of our desire to have things in a simple, easy-to-digest format. Our brains are wired to process this type of data quickly, and it also allows us to reach our desired conclusions with much more efficiency.

Using Data

Once we have the right questions, the data to provide us with the right answers, and the right format for displaying and analyzing that data, we can start putting it to work, allowing us to compare, share, and compete. 

If you want to understand the power of this cycle, then here is an example: just take a look at the story behind Opower. The company was founded upon an interesting premise: that people will not strive to save energy just because being energy-efficient is good for the environment. On the contrary, we are motivated by a different desire: the desire to win competitions against our friends.

By accessing and disseminating data collected from users and energy companies, Opower shares energy usage figures and costs, so you can compare and compete against your neighbors to see who can save the most on their energy bills. Opower’s goal is then realized: helping people reduce energy costs, which in turn helps the environment.

How does your company manage big data? Are you getting everything you need out of your efforts? What skills or components, if any, do you think are lacking in your efforts to glean something useful out of all the data available?

* Image courtesy of Horia Varlan via creative commons

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Niko Niko and Millennials

Millennials are accustomed to giving and receiving bite-sized, real-time feedback in everything they do. We believe that work should be no different. And given that Gen Y represents the largest generation in US history, we’re making that desire felt. Fast. The days of legacy enterprise HR engagement and communication software are coming to an abrupt end. 

Rebecca Wetterman, a VP at NucleusResearch, explains that, "Millennials are used to an ongoing stream of feedback, and they're going to be looking for consistent short-term feedback and encouragement [at work].” Paul Hamerman, a VP at at Forrester Research Inc., agrees that, “companies are realizing that the annual performance review is becoming a dreaded task….we’re going to see performance [evaluation] move to a continuous stream where employees are held accountable for certain goals that drive the business.”

We at Niko Niko believe that employee engagement and job satisfaction are following the same trend. Companies want a regular pulse on how their people feel and millennials are willing and excited to share that information in real time….not in next year’s engagement survey. 

We’re excited to see other Niko Niko users and fans echoing the same sentiments. Today I received two tweets from @claudeemond about the reception of Niko Niko at a workshop with several millennials.

@MaxAWebster @NikoNikoApp I love it because I know that feedback on how a team member feels is paramount.

— Claude Emond (@claudeemond)

June 18, 2014

@MaxAWebster @NikoNikoApp Younger workshop participants (millennials) loved the app too. Not sure about older ones: weird for them :)

— Claude Emond (@claudeemond)

June 18, 2014

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We also signed up one of the largest student organizations in the world this week. Young people get Niko Niko. They want to promote a more open and sustainable workplace. And as they they rapidly become the face of the workforce, we’re excited to help them get there. :) 

- Max

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What Skills do You Need to Manage Big Data Management Decisions?

Big data is unquestionably changing the landscape for many businesses. The availability of such extensive data is too good of an opportunity to pass up: it provides keen insights into what consumers want, what they are thinking, and how they want to be reached.

The question, though, is how to manage big data, and how to make the right kinds of decisions when the data is available.

In looking at the big data phenomenon, a few trends emerge about what skills are needed to manage it, and what skills are needed to use it:

1) Technical Skills: These skills include coding and database management. The goal is to find ways to take the data and turn it into manageable chunks in order to facilitate analysis. In many instances, traditional database administrators familiar with SQL can start to transition to using a platform known as Hadoop, which is starting to make headway as a tool used in the data science surrounding “big data.”

Currently, there is a lot of talk about a growing skills gap, particularly for larger businesses, when it comes to finding people familiar with Hadoop. However, some businesses feel that cross-training their existing developers and administrators may be just the solution they are looking for.

2) Analytics Skills: Not only is there a technical skills shortage, but many businesses are starting to feel that there is a shortage of people adequately qualified to properly glean the right insights from big data. Businesses are in need of people who have strong critical thinking skills, as well as familiarity with analytical tools, in order to properly take advantage of big data.

3) Statistical Analysis: Simple statistical analysis can provide some indicators as to consumers’ likes and dislikes. However, more complex statistical analysis can start making certain predictions involving econometrics or machine learning. As Stanford economist Susan Athey explains, this can involve “modeling that predicts which link on a web page is going to get clicked on or which products consumers should be offered when they come to a Web page.”

Managers often need a combination of these skills in order to make effective decisions. Even if a manager does not have hard coding or technical skills, understanding how these skills work, the roles they play, and what limitations and innovations there are can keep that manager ahead of the curve.

The impact that analytics skills have is obvious: all of this data is great, but what use is it if we cannot turn it into logical conclusions that inform our business decisions? For that reason, many businesses are starting to shift their focus to finding people with “soft” business skills, like critical thinking, which have generally fallen by the wayside in recent years with the emphasis on hard technological skills, such as engineering and coding.

Who will be the leaders as systems and processes for analyzing and leveraging big data emerge? Some think it is those who are capable of analyzing “more sources of data more frequently.” What do you think? What essential skills would you add to the list?

*Image courtesy of Craig Chew-Moulding via creative commons

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How to Design Effective Experiments for Your Business

We’ve talked about how to embrace experimentation in your business and the use and development of data via the quantified self movement, but the next question gets down into the meat and potatoes of experimentation in your company: specifically, how do you develop experiments? 

There are a few different components to the experimentation process. You are probably already familiar with most of them, but simply do not apply them on a day-to-day basis. Take a look at this step-by-step approach called the Lean Analytics cycle, introduced by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz: 

Decide what you want to improve. This involves identifying important aspects of your business and what needs to happen: e.g. increased conversion rates, lower employee turnover, etc.

Develop a hypothesis. Taking marketing as an example, you might develop the hypothesis that a change in your content strategy to posting one article per week relevant to your industry will gain you additional website traffic. If you have access to some data through prior analytics, you could use this to develop other potential hypotheses and see how manipulating the variables you identify changes that data. If not, you might want to do some research on your chosen area of improvement and see what other companies in your sector have tried.

Create an experiment. Determine who your target audience is, what you want them to do, and how you are going to motivate them to do it by making it worthwhile for them.

Measure the results and determine where to go from there. If your experiment works, you can turn it into a regular process and practice at your business, then look for the next area you want to improve. If not, you may want to revise your hypothesis and try again.

This process of experimentation is more and more accessible with the advent of “Big Data.” The result has been businesses that are able to adapt quickly due to the availability of data, which can in turn be leveraged to create products that are more in line with what consumers want. It also translates into different management needs: now, in addition to knowing how to run a department, many managers are also expected to be able to turn the analytics generated by this data into actionable items. Being able to use data and experiment with it effectively is a huge part of the new management skill set, particularly with technology-oriented firms.

If handling data and interpreting analytics has not been your strong suit, then you may want to look into some of the basic concepts about designing experiments and get started. Fortunately, there are many tools available to help, including software and apps. And, keep in mind that you probably already do some of this kind of experimentation instinctively: making marketing decisions based on how many customers you get from your current efforts, or using customer feedback responses to tweak product features. All you need to do is find a way to effectively scale these efforts and see what other variables you can manipulate to get your desired results.

One caveat: try to keep formalized testing to places where it is appropriate and makes sense. Getting locked up in testing as a culture can have backlash if managers feel as if they cannot execute potentially good ideas without rigorous testing first. Then, innovation stagnates due to a fear of risk and decisions that require some amount of speed and timeliness can end up going unaddressed for too long while the testing is ironed out.

What are some experiments you can think of, using the processes described above, that you want to use to implement changes in your business?

* Image courtesy of Steve Jurvetson via creative commons

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Companies For People By People

Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath’s NYT editorial, “Why You Hate Work,” has blown up. And with good reason. In short, because few businesses are focused on people. Gallup’s now famous report on the state of the American workplace shows that 70% of the American workforce is disengaged. Think of your own life. When was the last time you or someone you know woke up excited and energized to head to the office? 

For many, work is just a grind. The centerpiece of an American dream that has proven hollow for most and a monotonous nightmare for many. People wake up early to drive in traffic to a drab building where they work long, unfocused hours — constantly interrupted by urgent, but useless to-dos and mind-numbing trivia — before heading home for a few precious, exhausted hours to spend their barely above decent wage on stuff that won’t make them happier. And these are just the folks who are lucky enough to have a job — the struggle that the truly poor face is a whole different degree of miserable. Society is sick. We need to fix it. 

For many in so-called “Gen Y,” the answer is to scrap it all. Forget the fancy house, the car, the family — just travel with a backpack from country to country. This lifestyle can be great to recharge, but is not a sustainable long-term strategy for most. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, which first introduced me to positive psychology, we’re naturally social beings who need grounding in communities to achieve long term satisfaction and meaning.

I agree with Tony and Christine that there is a better way. For most white-collar workers, the paradox is clear. Technology allows people to work and collaborate from anywhere around the world. Yet most folks remain chained to their desks. It allows people to access virtually any piece of knowledge known to mankind. Yet most of us are so consumed by the tsunami of zeros and ones that we can hardly breathe. It allows us to keep contact with colleagues and loved ones in real-time. Yet we have often have our noses so glued to Facebook that we forget the friend sitting across the table. I don’t have all the answers for our societal ailment — and I recognize that employers are only part of the puzzle — but as the founder of a small technology company, I have an idea of where to start. 

A few folks I care about. 

Build A People-Centered Organization

Every business should be centered on people. Start with your employees. Then your customers. Establish clear metrics and processes to determine if they are happy and excited to work with you. Provide tools to facilitate their personal growth inside and outside of the company. I believe that employee and customer satisfaction ratings are one of the best indicators of a company’s long term success. The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 Company is only 15 years today, down from 67 in the the 1920s. Many modern companies are so focused on short-term profits that they miss the long-term view of building something enduring. If you have people and customers who love to work with you, then the rest —including the actual product or service that you deliver — will take care of itself. This all sounds great, especially if you’re a large and successful organization like Zappos or Google. But how can a normal company successfully focus on people? 

1) Establish well-being metrics. 

You can manage what you measure. So if you want to optimize how your employees and customers feel, then you should establish clear emotional metrics. There are a number of ways to do so. Karen Greaves at Growing Agile presents several actionable ideas from the agile community that include daily 1-6 self-reported ratings, Niko Niko calendars, and other engagement surveys. Net Promoter Score and Employee Net Promoter Score are now famous measures used by many progressive organizations. At Niko Niko  we’re building customizable and easy to use software to help you track these measures and more from wherever your employees are located. 

2) Teach mindfulness. 

The benefits of meditation are clear for both your personal and professional lives. As philosophy professor Thomas Metzinger argues in his book The Ego Tunnel, the onslaught of advertising and digital distractions faced by everyone is “not only an organized attack on consciousness per se but a mild form of depersonalization.” If we truly believe in maximizing people’s focus and capacity to experience life, then we must help employees treat the brain “as a part of the body — a part that can be trained and must be tended to with care.” Fortunately, meditation and mindfulness resources are freely or cheaply available to all. 

3) Cultivate purpose.

 I believe in cultivating purpose on three levels. First, every employee should be able to tie his or her job directly to making someone else’s day a little bit better. Second, every person in an organization should be able to connect his or her function to the success of the larger organizational mission. The company’s leader should be able to explain some positive societal impact from this mission. Third, employers should allocate resources to allow employees to volunteer for or support a cause of their choice. 

4) Care. 

The single most important thing you can do to build a strong organization is to care. Care about your colleagues. Care about your mission. Care about something. People are attracted to authenticity and we all want to spend time with others who, for lack of a better term, give a damn. Always ask yourself why do I care about the people and organization? And how can I communicate it? For leaders like Tony Hsieh, this means offering a life coach for all Zappos employees to help with challenges in their life, professional or otherwise. Alternatively, caring could take the form of personal thank you notes. Or my personal favorite, just kicking it with folks outside of work. We’re all human, so embrace humanity wherever and whenever you can. 

These strategies are just a start. Over the next few weeks, I’ll dive in deeper to look at how to establish each concept in your company. Please share your thoughts and experiences building a people-centered organization!

- Max

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Quantified Self in the Workplace: Big Value or Big Brother?

The Quantified Self (QS) movement has started out with the best of intentions: use data that you can measure from your body, your productivity, your surroundings, and your life to make improvements to yourself and your habits. What makes you productive? What makes you happier? Record these things and replicate them for a better life.

  While these sentiments are full of positivity, there is always a snag when these types of ideas transition from our personal lives into our professional lives. For an example, just consider the origins of the cubicle. The open workplace was a movement based on the open floor plans found in many homes at the time, which many people felt were a positive step forward: the feeling of openness would surely transition well into the workplace, helping employees socialize more and feel more connected than being surrounded by the walls of an office.

Instead, implementation turned into an effort to cram as many workers into a small space as possible. The cubicle was supposed to fix the new problems this type of floor plan created, and started out as an “office landscape” – with multiple work heights, chances for privacy, and more ergonomics to be a more comfortable work area. Now, many people know them as the soulless beige walls that keep them encapsulated day in and day out, hunched over a computer.

So, what is to stop QS from turning into something similar – a plan to improve our personal lives that just utterly fails when translated into the work environment? 

To be sure, there are many chances to go astray when it comes to QS in the workplace: misuse of private data, micromanagement, invasiveness, and overreaching are just a few potential problems. Furthermore, how do you decide which data is important, and how do you fit it into meaningful frameworks to get the insights you want from it?

Data management is one thing, but helping employees see the benefit of data gathering is another. When trying to drive productivity by seeking out that data which is most important, managers can sometimes make employees feel as if their privacy is being invaded and like “big brother” is always watching. This, in turn, hurts morale and can actually have the opposite effect on productivity than what was intended.

So, what is a manager to do? 

1)   Make workplace privacy policies clear and explain what is being monitored, and why. Having this understanding upfront is important so that employees do not feel “spied on.”

2)   Keep “quantified self”-type experiments, where additional monitoring will take place, optional. Employees may feel better about being monitored if they know they can opt out at any time.

3)   Provide incentives for participants. Whether it’s additional time off, recognition of some kind, or any other creative type of incentive you can think of, you can always get employees on board by making them feel more appreciated for their efforts. 

Keep in mind that some of your efforts may also be limited not only by employee willingness, but by other logistical and even legal restrictions. If you want to collect medical data, for example, keep in mind the privacy laws concerning healthcare. If you carry a company health plan, you may even have certain HIPAA restrictions with which you must comply. That, and it is simply a good practice not to broadcast your employees’ private medical information.

  As far as logistical restrictions go, you may also run into issues with having some employees who do not have the necessary technology for monitoring purposes, such as smartphones or wearable tech. In those instances, you may want to consider having company-issued equipment for the purposes of the experiment or data collecting process.

How do you get employees on-board with QS monitoring activities? Have you run into any objections? What have you done to handle them? 

Image courtesy of Ali Smile via Creative Commons License

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The Benefits of “Quantified Self” in the Workplace

If you are just getting familiar with the idea of the quantified self, it is important for you to first understand the vast amount of data that you generate on a daily basis without even thinking about it. You may not even realize how many aspects of your life can actually be tracked in one manner or another, if you simply wanted to take the time to do it. Just a few examples to consider:

Body metrics: everything from weight and height, to tracking your physical feelings and sensations. This can include how many hours of sleep you got, to your perceived chronic pain levels, to calorie and nutrient intake.

Mood metrics: how you are feeling on any given day, looking at good days and bad days, or how focused or unfocused you feel.

Productivity metrics: progress made on projects you are working on, number of emails sent, number of tasks completed on your “to do list.”

Other activity metrics: everything from your clicks on social media, to time spent on the phone, purchases made, locations visited throughout the day and corresponding mileage, etc..

As you can see, you generate a vast amount of measurable data each day. The question is, on which parts do you want to focus? Tracking by default brings your awareness to certain patterns in the particular behavior or aspects that you track.

Using a simple example, take someone who weighs himself everyday to try to lose weight. The numbers start to produce a pattern and give him insights into which behaviors have what kinds of effects on his body. He may find he has gained a couple pounds in a day after eating a high sodium meal, or that dehydration has adverse long-term effects on his efforts. 

The same kinds of principles can be applied in the workplace, depending on what goals you want to achieve and what patterns and insights you want to identify. A sales team, for example, might try tracking client contacts aside from just looking at numbers from closed deals. 

As you introduce these tracking techniques, individuals get in the habit of tracking and eventually the data becomes useful. How many client contacts per day do your top salespeople make, including phone calls and emails? Can you set that as the standard for the other salespeople on your team? What other examples can you think of for other departments where correlating metrics and success might be more difficult? What kinds of metrics might you implement if your goal was to improve employee wellbeing?

Keep in mind the benefits of these types of metrics:

Measured data receives attention and can therefore stimulate certain activity; for example, people who wear pedometers tend to walk more than people who do not.

Metrics help form habits, both in doing the activity that gets tracked and in doing the tracking itself.

Metrics can create a social experience in the workplace.

For the final point, this aspect has long been part of the workplace, but mainly limited to a few certain areas. Sales teams have frequently held friendly competitions to stimulate activity. Many people are also familiar with the office weight loss challenge. Gamifying work activity in this manner creates a social aspect to data collection and related productivity stimulation. What other kinds of competitions can you think of that would drive activity and metrics in your office? 

* Image courtesy of mdxdt via creative commons

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Embracing a Culture of Experimentation in Your Business

Over the past several weeks, we have been taking a look at Agile, a system for software development that is slowly making its way into project management circles in other fields of business. While we here at Niko Niko are obviously big fans of the Agile system, this system is not the only way to introduce a spirit of experimentation and “quantified self” in the workplace. There are other ways you can introduce the idea of positive well-being and happiness at work in order to promote job satisfaction, retention, and productivity.

Experimentation in the workplace is a concept that is gaining a great deal of traction. However, there are always concerns about how much experimentation is too much. After all, if you are measuring virtually everything an employee does in hopes of spotting areas for improvement, will the employee eventually feel a bit too much like “big brother” is watching?

It all depends on how you introduce the concepts and roll them out to employees. Your focus should be less on “spying” and more on gathering only meaningful data. If you hone in on just a few pieces of information that you are trying to collect, then you can focus your monitoring systems on that data. The benefit: you do not have to monitor every moment of each employee’s day, making it less invasive and also helping you to avoid information overload. 

The question still lingers, however: how effective is it to measure things under the auspices of “quantified self,” which comes across as highly subjective, especially when factoring in unstructured and fragmented work data? To answer that question, let’s look at a comparable field: marketing data. Measuring marketing effectiveness by looking at consumer response was once considered “pseudoscience” and not given much credence in the business world. Now, marketing analytics is practically considered law. Few people question the validity of gauging customer reactions to different types of campaigns; the same should be true for internal data, including employee reactions and emotions.

To look at another area where data science has transformed a major industry, let’s consider healthcare. Data is now being used to determine the effectiveness of treatments for particular patients so as to gain a better understanding of outcomes when certain treatments are used. This system speaks to the same question being asked when it comes to marketing, and when it comes to quantified self: are you, as a business owner or manager, spending money in the most effective way possible?

When it comes to healthcare, finding a better correlation between diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes helps patients save money rather than throwing wasted dollars at ineffective medicine. For marketing, you want to know that your activities are ultimately getting you customers who spend money with you. And, for quantified self and internal metrics, you want to know that your systems, processes, and people are functioning efficiently so as to improve your bottom line. Finding a correlation between certain data related to mood and job satisfaction versus productivity will help you determine where and what to spend for the best results for your company.

What experiments have you tried for driving morale and productivity in your business? How do the experiments you conduct internally differ from those you do externally, for example with marketing and customer service?

*Image courtesy of Peter Megyeri via creative commons

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Guest Post: 3 Metrics for Reporting an Agile Pilot to Top Management

This is agile coach Bernd Schiffer's second post on Niko Niko calendars. This post focuses on how to report your Niko Niko data in the context of other key metrics in large organizations. Enter Bernd: 

During the introduction of Scrum in an enterprise, e.g. via an Agile pilot, the question of how to report to the upper or top management comes up. I’d suggest to use these three metrics as a starting point:

customer feedback

release burnup

happy index

Here are the details and the reasons for my choice:

1. Customer Feedback

You can have the highest velocity and produce a huge amount of software, but you won’t be happy if you can’t sell it. To sell it, you need customers who want to buy your software. They want to buy your software, if you provide what they need. Then they are satisfied and will give you thumbs up feedback, directly (surveys, comments, etc.) or indirectly (cash, click rate, etc.) Therefore you have to track customer feedback.

Customer feedback depends on the product type you build. Examples are:

conversion metrics (like e.g. the AARRR metrics from the Lean Startup movement)

number of customers who bought the product

number of customers who recommend your product

number of bugs

level of customer satisfaction (e.g. via a survey after every sprint review)

2. Release Burnup

Before using a burnup, let’s have a look at a burndown. Make the amount of work not done reportable with a release burndown. That line is plotted on a chart with the number of story or epic points on the y-axis and the sprint number on the x-axis. Where the line crosses the x-axis, that’s the sprint when you’ll run out of stories. If you want to have the line cross the x-axis at a certain date in the future, make sure to modify the content of your product backlog. That means, get rid of unnecessary stories or stories with low value. You might want to split stories to do so.

Getting rid of work leads to simplicity:

Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential. — principle of the Agile Manifesto

Example of a Release Burnup

A product owner has to work hard to make her product simple. That’s worth to be reported to the upper management. Therefore, a better alternative to a release burndown might be a release burnup.

A release burnup shows two lines on the same axes like the burndown chart. One line plots the total content of a product backlog in story points, the other line shows the amount of work done in story points (aka velocity). Where those two lines will meet, that’s when you’ll run out of work. If you don’t like that date, you can increase the velocity (increases the gradient of the work done curve), or you can prune your product backlog (decreases the gradient of the product backlog curve).

3. Happy Index

Make the team’s mood reportable by tracking a happy index. Therefore, encourage your team to track their moods via a niko-niko-calendar. For each week, calculate the team’s average mood. Plot the average mood in a chart, where the y-achsis is the happy index scale and the x-achsis is the time in weeks. Over time you’ll get a pretty good history over the team’s mood.

Example of Happy Index

Self-similarity to the rescue regarding scaling: You can track the average mood of departments if you calculate the average of the teams’ moods. Likewise,you can track the average mood of the whole company if you calculate the average of the departments’ moods. The company’s happy index, sounds good?

You can interpret the curve of a happy index like a stock price index, where the stocks are those of your work as an Agile coach or manager. If the stock price index turns up, your work as a coach or manager is good and your latest changes improved the working environment to the better for your teams. If the stock price turns down, you’re work as a coach or manager could be improved, and your latest changes weren’t succesful in the eyes of your people.

Why those 3 Metrics?

Every one of those metrics addresses a totally different area of interest when you start an Agile Pilot.

Model of Metrics for Reporting an Agile Pilot to Top Management

Customer feedback reflects the economical and emotional view to the outside of the product your Agile pilot produces.

The release burnup reflects the economical view to the inside of the product your Agile pilot produces.

The happy index reflects the emotional view of the inside of the team which works in your Agile pilot.

With those three metrics, you cover the most important views of an Agile Pilot from a manager point of view. Even better, those metrics are explained rather quickly, which means they are top management compatible.

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Bernd Schiffer is consultant, trainer and coach for Agile Software Development in Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about him on his homepage or contact him on  Twitter, Google+, Facebook,  XING or LinkedIn. This article and image are shared under a CC license. 

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Guest Post: How to Track the Team’s Mood with a Niko-niko Calendar

We at Niko Niko are obviously big fans of the Niko Niko calendar (from which we got our name and the methodologies of which we are trying to digitize and bring to all). There is no bigger expert on the Niko Niko cal than Agile Coach Bernd Schiffer. Bernd has written two excellent posts on Niko Niko calendars, metrics, and how to present Niko data in an large organization. We will be sharing both posts over the next two weeks. Enter Bernd: 

You can track a lot of stuff in Agile projects, like lead time, velocity, bugs and so on. Tracking those metrics helps the team to identify problems early and without them it’s harder to improve.

The faster you can get those numbers, the faster you can analyse them, look ahead and steer the project in a better direction. This is all about tightening the feedback loop. The faster you get feedback, the faster you can react.

Feelings are the fastest feedback I know.

Ever worked in a software development team which produced a very ugly bug? I mean those kind of bugs where you realize that the whole team will have to work hard for days and weeks to get rid of it. Yes, we all have been in that kind of situation, at least once. And there is always one team member who says something like “I knew it. I knew it before. I had this very bad feeling about exactly that thing…” And it’s not uncommon that some other team member then will nod in agreement, because they had a bad feeling about it, too. Most of the team felt the elephant in the roomlong before the mess occurred.

It would be great to track those feelings before it comes to the big mess, right? May I introduce the Niko-niko calendar …

Niko-niko calendar, also known as smiley calendar or happiness index, is a tool to track the mood of a team. Nikoniko is Japanese ideophone for smiling. You set up a calendar, and each team member tracks her mood after each working day with a smiley. That could be a happy :-), straight :-| or frowning smiley :-(.

You can create such a tool in a few steps:

Get a regular calendar and put on a wall in a highly visible place in the team room. Hang it up somewhere near the exit, so the team members have easy access to it when they go home in the evening.

Divide the space of each day in as many fields as you have team members.

Put pens close to the calendars, so the tracking would not fail because there was no pen at hand. You might want to use three color pens: red for the frowning smiley, black or yellow for the straight smiley, and green for the happy smiley. That way the team’s mood is visible even more.

Track the team’s mood. Let the team make a working agreement or a policy, something like: “Whenever a team member calls it a day, before she walks out of the room, she draws a smiley in one of the fields of the calendar’s day, expressing her average mood of the day.”

Now start tracking. That’s it, the team is now tracking their mood.

(Hint: You might want to get one of it-agile’s team calendars. They’re designed to support teams, with rows for each team member, where they could draw their smiley into. On the downside, the calendars are in German, but on the upside, they’re free – and you’ll understand them even if you don’t understand any German.)

In regular intervals (like e.g. in each retrospective) the team gathers to analyse the data. Here are a few examples in a team with five members, where the average over the last period was …

… one happy smiley, four frowning smileys (or one frowning smiley and four happy smileys): What’s going on here? Does the team have an outsider? Why is there such a big diversion?

… all frowning smileys: Uh, bad karma in the team. Why? What is upsetting them?

… all happy smileys, and a broken sprint, angry customers, bad code, lots of bugs: Why are they happy in the middle of a mess? Why don’t they care about their work?

In my experience, data from a Niko-niko calendar is a huge opportunity for reflection, and it’s an amazing fast one, too. You’ll get feedback from changes like altering the environment immediately. In case of a good change, the team’s mood will lighten up, and in case of a bad change, … well, you get the point. And with a Niko-niko calendar the team will get immediate feedback on its mood.

To sum this up: Niko-niko calendars are a great complement to other metrics like lead time, velocity, bugs and so on. They help to make the team’s mood visible for better reflection. Niko-niko calendars are in many cases much faster when it comes to indicate problems. They are easily built and ready to use in almost no time.

If you haven’t tried a Niko-niko calendar, you might want to give it a try. If you have tried it, please share your experience in the comments.

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Bernd Schiffer is consultant, trainer and coach for Agile Software Development in Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about him on his homepage or contact him on  Twitter, Google+, Facebook,  XING or LinkedIn. This article and image are shared under a CC license. 

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Niko Niko Calendars: Benefits and Challenges to Tracking Moods

Catch up on our series on Agile and Niko Niko calendars here. Summarizing the series so far, Agile is a software development methodology currently being considered by many different management teams for potential use outside the realm of software development. It articulates a series of values and principles teams should consider as part of their production process, and utilizes mood-tracking tools called Niko-niko calendars as part of its metrics.

There are a number of benefits to using Niko-niko calendars as part of your team’s Agile implementation. For teams who do post-project breakdowns, it can be a useful tool for looking back and reflecting on particular phases in a given project and evaluating trends throughout the project’s lifecycle. For management teams, it can be useful to see how a particular employee or group of employees is faring, and gives some early warning signs so that managers can intervene or schedule one-on-one meetings for team members who may be struggling.

In general, it is far more feasible to make team and company improvements when managers are aware of when there are struggles or shifts in morale. When teams are generally seeing a downward trend in terms of mood, it can become easier to find the source of any conflicts or problems when those trends are graphically depicted on a Niko-niko calendar. These calendars also facilitate open discussions about what the team is struggling with and how to rectify the issues.

While these calendars provide a better way of tracking mood versus no methods at all, they still present certain shortcomings. First of all, calendars can become cumbersome for large teams to maintain. Second of all, not everyone may be compelled to share honestly. Companies must cultivate a culture of honesty in order to realize true benefits from Niko-niko calendars. 

Our company, Niko Niko, is obviously a great proponent of the use of these types of calendars! We have been seeking ways to solve these shortcomings by helping companies develop cultures of honesty, or else finding solutions that allow for anonymous feedback, particularly in larger organizations where calendars can become particularly challenging. As teams grow and are widely distributed, we also look for ways for them to connect and scale these calendars to fit their particular companies. 

Have you used a Niko Niko calendar before? How did it help you? What challenges did you face? Did you find good strategies for overcoming those challenges? Let us know and drop a line to [email protected]!