The Secret to Increasing Team Morale: Think Like an Agile Software Engineer

Increased communication leads to improved team morale. This may seem obvious. But, the path to high team morale may not be clear. In order to learn the secrets of increasing team morale through high team communication, take a lesson from Agile engineering teams. The secret is to think like an agile engineer:

Secret 1: Clearly define and explicitly state everyone’s role on the team

Defining roles has proven invaluable, not only for software teams, but for all types of business teams. In fact, when roles are not clearly defined, confusion sets, communication breaks down, and morale suffers.

Last year, I was led a retrospective for a team that had been working together for 6 months. In the retrospective, the stakeholder said “I thought the engineers were responsible for the Product Owner role.” Given that the entire team was present at the meeting, including all four engineers, I replied “Please tell me specifically which engineer you think owns the Product Owner role.” At this point, the stakeholder’s face turned red and he apologized. It was immediately clear that the team had not explicitly defined who would own the Product Owner role, and the team suffered significantly.

One effective way to explicitly set roles is to do a project Liftoff. A Liftoff is basically a project kickoff, yet focuses on:

• Defining the team charter
• Explicitly defining team roles
• Crafting working agreements (see Secret 2 for details)

Liftoffs are ideal at the start of a team project, yet are effective when held at any point in a team’s journey.

Secret 2: Communicate clear expectations for team members

It’s easy to assume that team members know what to do based on their participation in past projects. Unfortunately, the riskiest assumptions are the ones that were once true. Meaning, each person comes to the team with their own set of assumptions. These assumptions are based on things that have worked for an individual in the past. Yet, that doesn’t mean that these things will work for them on their current team.

Nip this in the bud by setting clear expectations. Craft working agreements for your team. Working agreements detail how the team agrees to get work done. Bring the team together for 2 hours. Brainstorm and agree on working agreements as a team. Examples of working agreements include:

• The Product Owner defines Done, and keeps track of this in Trello.
• We have core working hours and respect them.
• Meetings start and end on time.
• In-person communication is preferred.

Secret 3: Prioritize team productivity over individual productivity

Individual productivity and team productivity often go hand in hand. However, sometimes they clash. For example, an employee is facing a 1 hour commute each way in order to make a 1 hour in-person team meeting. The team has 8 people on it. The individual can easily justify her reasons for staying home: She can get 2 more hours of work done if she doesn’t have to drive into the office.

However, by staying home, she’ll have to do the 8 person team meeting by Google Hangout, and the meeting involves a lot of whiteboarding and writing on stickies. Therefore, the entire team’s productivity will be negatively impacted if she stays home. So, the best thing for the team productivity is for her to drive into the office.

Secret 4: Make brutal honesty a requirement of your culture

Hold regular retrospectives to discuss problems and work towards continuous improvement. At the start of each retrospective, read the retrospective prime directive:

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

Read Agile Retrospectives to get dozens of ideas of activities to run during retrospectives. Retrospectives should be held regularly. They can vary in length and frequency so long as they are part of your culture.

Secret 5: Set measurable goals and check on progress

The Stride leadership team has quarterly priorities. At the start of each quarter, we pick a handful of top quarterly goals. For each goal, we:

• Define done
• Assign 1 person accountable
• Assign 1 product owner
• Create a 90 day roadmap.

We track our progress in Google Docs. Also, every 2 weeks, the accountable person meets with the product owner to showcase progress and remove obstacles.

Agile engineering teams have been iterating on quick feedback loops and embracing change for over 15 years now. As a result, Agile teams feel empowered and trusted, and this often leads to some of the highest morale teams I’ve seen. Embrace these 5 secrets and you’ll be on your way to improving team morale at your company too.