Finally in our week of blogs from the Story Museum, Oxford…

The mood tree

As part of the Happy Museum project, we’re interested in learning about the impact we have on our visitor’s wellbeing, so we’ve introduced a Mood Tree (or rather, two) for a programme of public conversations with leading story experts, The Thousand and One, hosted by our curator of stories Michael Rosen. Guests are invited to choose a leaf whose colour best represents how they feel when they arrive and hang it on the ?before’ tree. The leaves go from green (happy) through to red (not at all happy).  They do this again after the event has finished. Those who’ve taken part so far have demonstrated a distinct change in mood, as this picture shows.

The team meeting happy tracker

It’s now part of a regular routine at our weekly staff meeting: giving our individual wellbeing status a rating from one to five. The ?happy score’ is not necessarily related to work ? anything affecting our wellbeing can influence the rating, but no-one is obliged to explain why. Though we have noticed from time to time that Arsenal’s performance has a direct bearing on the mood of some of our team!