Everybody knows that teams of engaged people can accomplish amazing things, but how to capture that feeling of "awesomeness," and how to know what to do when it's not there?
Satisfaction surveys, agile retrospectives, happiness metrics -- all are designed to get at this. What if there were a way to combine the best of all these approaches into one simple technique? What if you could get the qualitative and the quantitative information you need to help your teams be more awesome?
Awesomeness is that technique. Check out the slides for the details and go to www.awesomeness.team for tools to help your team become more awesome.
2. Engaged Employees
are enthusiastic about their work
create better customer experiences
influence other employees
provide feedback and ideas
get more $%^& done at higher quality
3. “Happier people are about
12% more productive”
University of Warwick, 2014
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/eproto/workingpapers/happinessproductivity.pdf
6. Agile Retrospectives
3 Qs at the end of each sprint
– what went well during the sprint?
– what went wrong during the sprint?
– what should we do differently?
focus on process
often just a b*&%$ session
7. The Real Reasons
Teams stop doing retros because they
don’t seem effective
Process often is not the real culprit
12. 1/3 Problem Discovery
1. How awesome is it being at the
company?
2. How awesome is it being on this team?
3. This sprint, how awesome was the work
you did?
23. Teams Activity
How awesome is it being part of ANE?
• 1-5 rating + comments on 1 card (3m)
• Record average score
• Discuss and choose 1-3 key problems
(15m)
• Brainstorm ideas to address problems
(15m)
• Dot vote to nominate one (5m)
24. Whole Group Activity
• Each team:
– announces their score
– presents their chosen idea (2m each)
• Bruce records
• Dot voting
• Assign owners?
25. Awesomeness
combine the measurability of surveys with
the open dialog of an agile retrospective
get to the heart of issues every few weeks
figure out what to do about it
measure progress
Talk about my background
Q. Who’s been on a really awesome team before? What was it like? (take 2-3 examples)
Studies show morale is key
As a leader, it’s your job to increase your team’s morale and effectiveness, but it’s hard to know what to do or even where to start
Often the real reasons for lack of high velocity, quality, and morale do not come out of just talking about process
Example of team member that was let go the day before
I started looking into the work done at Crisp.se and scrum inc on measures of morale or what they call “team happiness.”
Some teams have started measuring what they call team happiness or team satisfaction on a regular basis. They might use a visualization like emojis. Some even do this daily. I think they are on to something, but in talking with a lot of teams I work with they all thought happiness seemed squishy and maybe not related enough to work. They kept saying how they were trying to create an awesome team or company and they wanted to measure progress.
Working with a lot of teams at a lot of companies I’ve developed a hybrid process combines the benefits of both agile retros and morale tools like employee satisfaction surveys
Ask 3 very different questions
We started using stickies for simultaneous voting so people did not influence each other
Then we discussed what the reasons were for the numbers people gave
Going around the room
This brought out what was positive and negative, just like the questions in a regular retro
But it brought out the issues at these 3 discrete levels so we could unpack them and examine things at each level
Notice these +s on some of the items
This is where other people said these issues were affecting them, too
After going all the way around the room, I circle the items with the most pluses that are affecting our awesomeness the most
I usually switch marker colors then and we brainstorm possible solutions
And we agree on a short list of things to try, and assign owners
Blur crew names
Blur crew names and detailed responses
DI screenshot from GDocs
Other screenshot from GDocs
Screenshots from Pinpoint
Management can see trends and get early warning of issues as well as feedback on events
One company went through a lot of thrashing on their roadmap and you could see the awesomeness scores going down week by week as comments about lack of a roadmap kept piling up. This lit a fire under management to get the roadmap out more quickly.