And the best metric for tracking performance is …
In a recent episode of our Engineering Leadership podcast, our Director of Engineering, Vojtech Vondra, was asked an interesting question: what’s the best metric for tracking the performance of engineering teams?
Traditionally, performance is measured in terms of velocity — the more work a team gets through, the better it is performing. But according to Vojtech, there’s a more fundamental indicator that we should be focusing on first.
“It all starts with happiness”
Engineering teams are made up of people, not machines. And to thrive, people need to be happy. Trying to measure velocity or output without first understanding people’s emotional needs is like putting the cart before the horse.
Imagine a team that’s meeting all its deadlines, but whose team members are hopelessly miserable. Perhaps they feel undervalued, underpaid, bored, or even afraid. Using non-human metrics only, this team would appear to be high-performing. But in reality, that level of performance will be unsustainable if the toxic environment isn’t dealt with.
When you start with happiness, you have a much better chance of long-term high-performance and productivity. People are more likely to stick around to see projects through. As Vojtech puts it: “Happiness multiplies any other optimization or outcome you can get from a team.”
But for this to work, we need one more key ingredient.
The importance of clear goals
In addition to being happy, high-performing engineering teams — or any team for the matter — need clarity and communication around goals.
Goals provide context. Without them, work can soon start to seem abstract or even pointless. Successful teams know what they are working towards, why, and how their efforts play into the wider strategy of the company. This gives them motivation and a sense of purpose.
When leaders focus on providing happiness and clear goals, performance should naturally improve. It’s that simple.
Happiness + clear goals = high-performing teams
What does a team need to be happy?
Like engagement or motivation, happiness is notoriously hard to define. There isn’t one sure-fire way to make someone happy — what works for one person might not work for another. That said, there are some universal factors that naturally lead to people feeling satisfied and secure at work. Here are some key examples.
- Healthy relationships
When you work with people you trust and feel comfortable around, work becomes somewhere you enjoy being. It’s important that we create a work environment where everyone is made to feel welcome and accepted, and where open and honest communication is the standard.
- Autonomy
Although some degree of hierarchy is inevitable, the role of senior staff should be to enable their team to make their own decisions, not to tell them what to do. A degree of autonomy is essential to give people the freedom to learn, grow, and find solutions that work for them.
- Learning and development
We all have an innate desire to improve. Teams that harness this desire by providing opportunities to learn and develop are much more likely to be successful and productive. And in our rapidly changing world, professional development isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s essential.
- Recognition
Recognition is such a simple way to make people feel valued. And with the array of social and collaboration tools now available, it has never been easier for people to give and receive recognition in an informal, spontaneous way.
How do you measure happiness?
Happiness isn’t as easy to measure or quantify as more traditional performance metrics, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. There is now a broad range of productivity and engagement tools that give us a clearer picture of the human factors that drive engagement and happiness at both an individual and team level.
At producboard, we use Culture Amp — a platform that makes it easier to collect, understand, and act on employee feedback. Specifically, it helps us track factors like those mentioned above — peer relationships, development, autonomy, goal setting, and so on — and then presents the data in a clear, easily accessible way. This gives engineering managers a snapshot of their team and helps them spot issues as they arise.
In addition to technology, we also have our human intuitions. Good managers should have the emotional intelligence and empathy to gauge when their team are happy, motivated, and goal-oriented, and when they aren’t. This applies to remote teams as well as in-office ones.
These skills are something Vojtech focuses on heavily when recruiting engineering managers. “I tend to ask managerial candidates about team happiness during interviews. I also look at Glassdoor ratings, to see how happy their team really is. I wouldn’t say it’s a red flag if their team is unhappy, but they should definitely be aware of it, understand what’s causing it, and have ideas about how to fix it.”
When it comes to understanding people’s emotional state, sometimes it’s as simple as asking. For all the data analytics in the world, nothing beats honest, open communication.
Measuring inputs, not outputs
So, are leaders wasting their time measuring purely traditional performance-related metrics such as velocity? According to Vojtech, they are:
“I’d rather spend my time measuring metrics related to happiness and ensuring that goals and our mission are clear — both of which are ‘inputs’ — rather than focusing on traditional ‘outputs.’ If you have the right conditions in place, i.e. a happy team with clear goals, performance should take care of itself.”
Interested in joining the Czech Republic’s hottest startup? We’re always on the lookout for talented engineers. Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies.
