Team Fever? Grab the Thermometer!

With symptoms ranging from runny noses, to dry coughs, to fevers that put you in terrible sweats, getting sick is never fun. Being sick is even more disruptive to a team when someone has to miss work and others have to pick up slack, work later, or come up with other innovative ideas on how to continue at the same pace.

The same applies when team members are "sick" at work and have negative symptoms in their work environment; their productivity and quality are negatively impacted.  So how do I gauge how a team feels? I take their temperature.  A temperature gauge is my favorite way to start conversations and anonymously see how team members feel.  I do this before starting a retrospective, but this can be used in other meetings, at a wider level, or even at home for family meetings.

STEP 1

Create a thermometer with a scale, and feel free to make it fun.  With a recent team, someone saw my thermometer and thought I had the junior high girl I mentor work on it. In reality, I was the horrible artist, but the team loved it. We knew what it was for and it served it's purpose.

STEP 2

Create a measurable scale for the thermometer.  I like to use 1-10, though I have also used 1-5 to make it less convoluted.  You can also use words like "Perfect", "Not the Best", "Lousy", "Can I go Home and Never Come Back."  The point is to have some way of measuring how people are feeling.

STEP 3

Identify and document what the scale means and what is being measured so that there is no confusion. What does 1 really mean versus a 5? Am I allowed to use 5.5 or other fractions?
What are we measuring (the last iteration, the release, external factors, etc)?

STEP 4

Have each team member vote anonymously.  I like to hand out post it notes on which individuals write their temperature and hand it in.

STEP 5

Average the responses to get the temperature.

STEP 6

Follow up immediately on why the team thinks the temperature is the way it is.  What factors brought us to a 6?  How do we get to a lower temperature so we don't have a fever?

Document and decide as a team how to resolve any issues that were brought up.

STEP 7

Keep a rolling graph in the team area on the temperatures throughout the project.  You will mostly notice that as velocity lowered or things weren't getting done that the team temperature was worse.  

Let me know in the comments if you have been doing something like this or will be trying it, and what your result is.

TIPS:

• If a team  has low temperatures all the time, it could be a good thing or it can be that your team doesn't feel like they can be open. Evaluate the cause.

• Do not call people out if you think they put a bad temperature in.  Keep the conversations objective and allow for openness among the team members.

• If issues come up that will continue to impact the project, put those items in the backlog so they can be mitigated or resolved.