This is a short guide on team happiness/health/morale checks, why they’re important, and four practical examples you can run with your team.
Happy people are productive people, say researchers from Warwick University. They found that improving an individual's happiness led to 12% more productivity at work. Also, if people are happy, they are motivated to both do their work and support their colleagues, thus building collaborative, trusting, and adaptive teams.
So there are obvious benefits to people being happy at work, but happiness is a catch-all term used to mean a variety of emotions that are always in flux. Happiness comes in various forms, and it means something different to me than it does for you or anyone else.
There is a circular relationship between how our work makes us feel, how we feel about our work, and how those feelings affect our work.
Measuring team happiness is not a box-checking exercise for HR, nor a managerial instrument to motivate, reward, or punish staff. It is a technique intended to help a team of people acknowledge and self-assess how they feel about their work. It promotes discussion of how to work better together.
Cynics would say a team doesn’t need to be happy to perform. And they have a point. There isn’t, and shouldn’t be a single ‘happiness’ metric to chase. A team’s well-being and productivity is as varied and nuanced as the individuals in the team. So forget about measuring an overall happiness metric, but aim to uncover and discuss the different factors that contribute to your team health.
These are the underlying factors that make a job worth working for - autonomy, learning, feeling worthwhile, doing impactful work, feeling trusted, respect, cooperation, belief in the mission, and even having the appropriate tools to do the job. For example, this Harvard Business Review article points to research where team members report more satisfaction and positivity through practicing virtuosity at work than when they receive further compensation benefits.
Team health checks are closely related to retrospectives. They expose similar surface-level issues but have different ways of getting to the root of problems. Retrospectives often look at the processes and factual events of a sprint, but rarely dig into the underlying emotional factors of working in a team.
A health check shouldn’t feel like embarking on a wellness retreat, with a green tea colonic round the corner. It is crucial to introduce the topic of team health checks carefully, taking the time to explain why you would like to try running one. Some key tips:
These are examples of how you can introduce health checks to your team.
Use a team health check before a meeting to see how the team is feeling.
Example - thermometer check-in activity - use this template now
What is it?
Why do it?
How to run it
Hints and Tips
Instead of holding a typical retrospective, offer the team the time to score how they feel across various factors. You will have more time to explore issues, so either run a variety of exercises with the team or deep dive into problem areas.
Example - Team Health exercise in Metro Retro - use a Team Health Check template now
What is it?
Why Do It?
How to run it
Run a quick check to see if the team feels after a meeting.
Example - a closing activity in Metro Retro
What is it?
Why Do It?
How to run it
When a team wants to track their mood as a metric, there are tools to collect, track, and analyze the data together. This could help predict problems before they occur.
Use this method carefully and make sure individuals can opt-in and opt-out as they want (offer to run it as an experiment that can be cancelled). Make sure the data is not offered up to management nor is treated as performance data, but is for the team’s eyes only.
Example - Team Mood
What is it?
Why Do It?
How to run it
A Team Health check is one of the many tools you can use to help a team perform self-assessment and identify improvements. It provides a space to talk about team effectiveness and factors impacting it.
Team Health checks are not solely about chasing a happiness metric, but about uncovering all the elements that make people in your team feel happy and productive.
Start a team space in Metro Retro to get access to mutliple Team Health Check templates.
For more reading around team happiness and health, check out these blog articles I enjoyed reading.
http://www.andycleff.com/2020/05/agile-team-health-check-models/
https://www.intercom.com/blog/why-happiness-at-work-really-matters/
https://blog.crisp.se/2019/03/11/jimmyjanlen/health-checks-for-teams-and-leadership