Team health checks have been popular in the Agile Community for years. Getting people to pay attention to the joy in their teams is a boon. The challenge is the primary measure that people like to use is Happiness. Happiness is important, but it’s too broad a measure for teams at work. When measuring happiness, we’re measuring many things outside of work, for example: the state of someone’s marriage, did they get enough sleep last night,etc..
We need something that more accurately measures the health of a team and their willingness to work together. Morale is a good choice because it is task and team oriented and is well-studied in the scientific literature. It is less subjective and less affected by mood.
The best measurement tool I’ve found is at: https://teammetrics.theliberators.com
Caveat: if you attempt to reduce the four questions asked in the survey down to one or two, it’s hardly better than a happiness questionnaire.
Resource Links:
- Agile Teams: Don’t use happiness metrics, measure Team Morale This blog post has a surprising degree of rigour and is the original source of Morale in the Agile Community.
- How I Measure Scrum Team Morale – similar ideas, the questions may not have the proven rigour of the others
- Agile Team Health & Morale Checks offers every team health check you could imagine. Some good, some I wouldn’t recommend.
See Also:
Metrics and Measurement
Open Office
Team Rooms
Mark Levison has been helping Scrum teams and organizations with Agile, Scrum and Kanban style approaches since 2001. From certified scrum master training to custom Agile courses, he has helped well over 8,000 individuals, earning him respect and top rated reviews as one of the pioneers within the industry, as well as a raft of certifications from the ScrumAlliance. Mark has been a speaker at various Agile Conferences for more than 20 years, and is a published Scrum author with eBooks as well as articles on InfoQ.com, ScrumAlliance.org an AgileAlliance.org.
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