How To Evaluate And Elevate Your Team Morale To Meet Objectives
What prevents your product team from being efficient, collaborative and accountable?
You have the opportunity to work with a new product team. Weeks go by and they are not able to meet the objectives. Retrospectives are not very helpful, they always point out that something needs to be improved, but in a very abstract way.
Their performance leaves much to be desired. When you talk to them, they seem to lack interest in what they are doing.
Sounds familiar?
I strongly believe that people are at the core of every product. Product teams are the ones making the magic happens. Doesn’t matter how pretty your roadmap is or the time it took you to transform the vision to a simple task for your engineers. If they feel disengaged, it will be difficult for them to achieve anything.
🚨This post will not cover the physical or mental health of an individual. Neither their career path or lack of one. So, with no further ado let’s get started 👇
Evaluating the Current Situation
Before defining which KPIs will be useful to evaluate your team’s efficiency or start sending them surveys, prioritize learning about the current situation. Before improving anything, you need to take some steps back and understand if there are things that they have tried before and assess how they have performed in the past.
Here's a roadmap to effectively measure the team's health and their contribution to the product value:
1️⃣ Initial Observations and Conversations
Meet the Team: Before diving into metrics and reports, get to know your team. Understand their roles, challenges, and what they enjoy about their work. These initial conversations can be revealing.
Stakeholder Interviews: Talk to key stakeholders, including customers, to get a sense of how they perceive the product and the team’s work. This can offer insights into alignment between team efforts and stakeholder expectations.
2️⃣ Review of Historical Performance Data
Product Metrics: Look at key product metrics such as user growth, engagement rates, and revenue performance over time. Are these metrics trending positively, or are there areas of concern?
Delivery Metrics: Evaluate past sprint cycles, feature delivery timelines, and quality metrics (bug rates, downtime incidents). This will help you understand the team's efficiency and quality of work.
3️⃣ Current Workflow and Processes Analysis
Agile Ceremonies: Participate in or review the outcomes of recent sprint planning, retrospectives, and stand-ups. How well does the team plan, execute, and reflect on their work?
Tool Utilization: Assess how effectively the team uses project management and communication tools. Are tasks and updates clearly documented and easily accessible?
4️⃣ Qualitative Health Indicators
Team Morale and Engagement: An engaged team is more productive and innovative. Use one-on-one meetings or anonymous surveys to gauge morale, job satisfaction, and engagement.
Innovation and Learning: Is the team encouraged to learn and implement new technologies or processes? Continuous learning is key to staying competitive and delivering value.
5️⃣ Quantitative Performance Indicators
Velocity: Though not the sole measure of productivity, understanding if the team's velocity is stable, increasing, or decreasing can provide insights into team efficiency.
Quality Metrics: Look at the number of production issues, bugs reported post-release, and the time taken to address critical bugs as indicators of the product quality.
6️⃣ Alignment with Business Goals
Feature Impact Analysis: Evaluate how recently released features have performed against expected business outcomes. This requires clear metrics for each feature to measure impact.
Roadmap Realignment: Assess the current product roadmap's alignment with broader business objectives. Are the team’s efforts focused on the most impactful areas?
Focus on Team Morale Instead of Happiness
One of the things I disagree with about Scrum is the promotion of "happiness metrics" all the time to measure the health of a team. I think its author Jeff Sutherland had good intentions back then when he introduced this based on a research in the UK:
Happier people are about 12% more productive.
But the reality is, at least from my experience, that happiness a very ambiguous word. And the use of Net Promoter Score to measure this it just makes it worse. Just imagine someone asking you: “Are you happy working here?” What does that even mean? Happiness can differ so much from individual:
Max is happy when no one is disturbing him
Jenn is happy when it’s sunny outside
Sarah will be happier if she wins the lottery and stopes working
Carl believes he will be happier if he changes careers
I think you get it, right? When it comes to focusing on employee happiness, there are challenges in measurement, reliance on self-reporting that can be biased, difficulties in comparing across regions and cultures, and not to mention every unique situation people face at different stages of life.
Instead of focus your attention on measuring a person’s happiness, try to redirect their feedback to the processes, tools, their team, vision and the company.
I believe that team morale is a better indicator of a team's health and productivity. Morale speaks to the overall attitude, satisfaction, and engagement of team members in their work. It takes into account factors such as teamwork, communication, recognition, and alignment with the product vision and goals.
Some of the advantages of using morale instead of relying only on happiness metrics are:
🌀 Happiness can be very susceptible to day-to-day fluctuations and individual moods, whereas morale focuses on the collective dynamics of the team and how its members feel about their shared goals and collaboration. Providing a stronger indicator of the health of the team and its ability to work together effectively.
📈 High morale is often associated with higher productivity and better performance, indicating not just how team members are feeling, but also providing data on likely outcomes in terms of work consistency and quality.
🕒 Unlike happiness, which can change swiftly based on personal circumstances or transient events, morale generally accumulates over time and is indicative of long-term team trends.
🎭 Solely measuring happiness could inadvertently mask underlying issues, since team members might report being happy to comply with social desirability or out of fear of potential repercussions.
🤝 By prioritizing team morale, companies can foster a culture that values collaboration, common goals, and the means to achieve them. Allowing the space for continuous improvement and engagement.
At the end, you’ll notice a big difference between a team with low and another one with high morale. Even the atmosphere feels different.
Helpful Team Morale Insights
To improve team morale in product teams, focus on factors that impact team dynamics, satisfaction with work, and emotional engagement. You can use surveys or feedback tools regularly to gather metrics and identify areas needing improvement.
The factors or themes that, in my opinion, deserve the attention of any leader are: teamwork, leadership, communication in general, role clarity, job satisfaction and recognition, work-life balance, etc.
Combining these areas with easy sentences (no need to ask elaborate questions, otherwise you will hardly get straight answers); can help you detect the state of your team. For example:
📑 Questions to Identify Opportunities and Rate Team Morale
I created a simple survey to help you evaluate the morale in your team. Each question or sentence should be rated on a scale from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree) to facilitate easy quantification and trend analysis. Get your copy!
How to read the results?
Let’s not make it complex. Simply:
If you get 1 or 2s this is a red flag, there are things to be addressed immediately.
3s are neutrals but that does not means there’s no room for improvement.
4 or 5s these are better scoring, but try to keep an eye on them because you don't want these to diminish in the future.
Finally, use Microsoft or Google forms or whatever other tool you need to capture this information anonymously and understand the state of your team easily.
How to Improve Your Team’s Morale
I’ve Got Low Scores, Now What?
🌟 1. Understand the Underlying Issues
Hold Individual and Retrospective Meetings to dive deeper into concerns.
Practice Active Listening to ensure team members feel heard.
💬 2. Communicate Openly and Transparently
Share insights from the surveys and discussions, showing a commitment to change.
Provide Regular Updates on actions being taken to address concerns.
🛠️ 3. Implement Meaningful Changes
Address Immediate Concerns quickly to demonstrate commitment.
Outline and begin Long-Term Strategic Improvements for more complex issues.
👏 4. Reinforce a Positive Culture
Enhance a Recognition and Rewards system for achievements.
Conduct Team Building Activities to strengthen connections.
🤝 5. Enhance Collaboration and Accountability
Clarify Roles and Expectations for clear alignment with team objectives.
Encourage Empowerment and Decision Making by involving team members in choices.
🌀 6. Foster Continuous Improvement
Establish a Feedback Loop for regular insight into team morale.
Promote Training and Development for continuous learning and growth.
Embracing these steps can lead to an environment where team members are engaged, valued, and aligned with your company success.
Wrapping Up
Addressing low morale is more about building a bridge between leadership and team members, where trust, communication, and shared goals are the pillars. It's a process that requires time, commitment, and a lot of patience. Yet I think it’s worth it.
Is it easy? Probably not, specially at first. But as soon as you start tracking these indicators and taking responsibility over them, the more you’ll help your team start improving their work and fostering collaboration.
If you want to know more about this topic, you can check some of “The Liberators” content. Christiaan Verwijs has great thoughts on this!
That’s all for now. Let me know how you assess and elevate your team morale in the comments 👇