Introducing Friday to team leaders

Teams are diverse in the life experience, personalities and motivations of their individuals, but strong in their sense of collective identity, purpose and belonging. This makes them a powerful, but often neglected, starting point for culture building.

The quickest way to get teams active on Friday is to explain how it will help team collaboration and performance.

Friday – the gift of insight

Unlike most measurement systems team leaders are likely to have used before, Friday is designed to help teams learn and improve.

By providing weekly reports to the team, Friday gives them direct access to data on their experiences, and the science to interpret it.

This is a step change from outdated patterns of surveying, analyzing and planning – where feedback to employees is delayed while senior management study, and potentially censor, the results.

Friday amplifies the positive

Friday is designed to amplify the positive. We have a natural tendency to pay close attention to negatives (it helped keep our ancestors alive) – but this can lower morale.

Friday’s focus is on what makes working lives go well. By prompting you to reflect on happiness and its drivers, we are guiding you to give as much weight to the good bits about work as the not so good.

Other design features help here too. For example:

• The opportunity to send Thank-you notes each week raise levels of positivity between colleagues
• The Presentation View emphasises strengths so teams can celebrate them – and seeing the positives helps put people in a better frame of mind to see others’ perspectives and come up with creative solutions.

Friday shares responsibility with the whole team

Friday encourages teams to meet and discuss results because it is in everyone’s interest and power to improve happiness – not in a ‘life project’ sort of way, but in the small things, like a personal exchange, which slowly accumulate to change how work feels.

Team leaders do not need to feel the ‘weight’ of their team’s happiness because they couldn’t ‘fix’ happiness even if they wanted to. Their role is more of a light-touch facilitator who prioritises the time for people to come together to talk about happiness – in the company of colleagues who can influence it.

Friday provides resources for teams

Friday provides resources for each question and tips on team conversations in our Help Centre, so teams and their leaders can make use of the science of happiness to improve work culture.