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.
There’s no formal approach to measuring morale, but a common method is to ask teams to rate some qualitative questions, which helps generate discussion. A short, practical version is:
In my team, I feel fit and strong;
I am proud of the work that I do for my team;
I am enthusiastic about the work that I do for my team;
I find the work that I do for my team of meaning and purpose.
Read the article “Agile Teams: Don’t use happiness metrics, measure Team Morale” by Christiaan Verwijs for more depth.
Caveat: if you attempt to reduce the four questions 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.
*Thank you for visiting the World's Largest Opinionated Agile Reference Library. This content is created and the links are curated through the lens of Agile Pain Relief Consulting's view of what is effective in the practice of Scrum and Agile. We don't accept submissions and emails to that effect are marked as spam. Book listings may use affiliate links that could result in a small commission received by us if you purchase, but they do not affect the price at all. From experience, this won't amount to anything more than a cup of coffee in a year.« Back to Glossary Index