Team Health and Wellbeing — A Leading Indicator of Just About Everything

How are your teams doing?

A lot of companies experiment with ways of measuring and visualizing how their teams are doing (KPI’s; ROV’s OKR’s etc.,) looking for areas where there are opportunities for improvement.

The general idea being ya can’t improve what ya don’t measure. Without some sort of systemic approach with clear visualization — things would very much be a guessing game.

But all of the above metrics are lagging indicators. By the time things have gone off the rails, the damage has been done.

One, if not the most important, leading indicators of team performance is health and wellbeing. As Corporate Rebels wrote, health and wellbeing is not simply “happiness” — it is more about resilience.

Two questions often come up when discussing team engagement and morale:

1. What are things that impact team health and wellbeing (positively and negatively)?
2. Can we really measure and visualize this stuff?

First the Bad News

Without some magic pixie dust, you just can’t make everyone happy. You can however create the conditions that are conducive to happiness. These conditions can be things like practices, resources, and environments.

Management 3.0 provides a great place to start, with 12 things you can put in place to “manage for happiness.”

But you can’t stop there. And there’s no “one size fits all” on a team — individuals will have very different motivations.

Now the Good News

You can experiment with any or all of the above12 things, and a few more of your own making. Which leads us to address the second question: “Can I really measure team health / happiness / wellbeing / resilience?”

The answer is a resounding “Yes.” There are many great visualization models out there. Let’s start with one that Spotify (Henrik Kniberg & Kristian Lindwall, Sep 2014) created and not too long ago refined.

Team Health Check Tools