healthy squads are happy squads

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

• Healthy squads are the foundation for productivity, collaboration, and innovation.
• Squad health surveys should be regular, unbiased, integrated, and allow for open feedback.
• Measuring squad health involves tracking key metrics like trust, growth, safety, and clarity.
• Actionable feedback from surveys helps identify and address trends before they impact the team.
• Focusing on squad health leads to happier, stronger, and more successful teams.

IBM’s Garage Method has a number of core tenets - one of which focuses on building teams and fostering a culture of collaboration and sharing. Across the Garage Methods, this tenant is common - it’s a cultural movement; it’s all about people.

An organization might adopt the most efficient processes or automated tools possible, but they’re useless without the people who run the processes and use the tools. Therefore, building a culture is at the core of adopting the Methodology

What makes a squad successful? For me, successful squads demonstrate a few key behaviours;

• Collaborative
• Productive
• Transparent
• Blameless
• Healthy

These behaviours are usually key indicators for me of a well functioning, cohesive and high performing squad. They are critical to the success of a squad as it strives to adopt a Garage culture, the methods, and iterates on its own ways of working.

Focusing on one point (the last on my list, but by far the most important imo) - your Squad Health.

So what is Squad Health? In short - it is a look at the overall satisfaction and wellbeing of your squad members, and crucially it is an enabler of almost all other key characteristics and behaviours of a successful squad - without a healthy, happy squad, you won’t get productive results or creative people.

How is it defined? How can it be measured in a meaningful way? The answer is, it all depends on the squad - however, the Garage Method provides a baseline method for helping to measure (and more importantly!) track the health of your squads … hopefully by adopting and implementing the Garage Methods, your squad is comfortable defining KPIs and measurable outcomes already - looking to software development, certain indicators of stability must be prized above all else. These indicators include the health of the current build based on the main stream of code, the health of running services with zero downtime as the target.

Squad health should be looked at as just as important as the health of your code or pipelines, and there should be regular checkpoints to help measure the health of your squad and allow for corrective actions to be taken if any negative trends start to develop for any of the metrics you have chosen to track.

A Squad Health survey can take many forms, a simple form, a mural board… the creativity in implementation lies with you and the team, however, it should meet a few basic criteria to ensure that the survey is effectively capturing the right data and ensuring that negative trends can be investigated and acted upon. Your survey is intended as an “information radiator”, helping surface feelings from the team to identify trends that need to be addressed.

Your survey should always be;

1. Regular - it’s best used as part of your team’s retrospective cadence. The survey only takes a few minutes to complete, and provides a quick snapshot of overall squad sentiment
2. Unbiased - surveys must be anonymous and should be taken individually, without bias from the rest of the team. You should average the responses from the team and plot results as they come in
3. Integrated - the exercise should be integrated into your squads ways-of-working and form a regular checkpoint that everyone understands the value in and is comfortable contributing towards (e.g. maybe dedicate the first 5 minutes of each retro to complete the survey)
4. Open - allow the team to answer honestly in the survey and play back to them. Allow for an open retro environment, giving those that wish to speak up about a topic the chance to voice their feelings and capture their comments

The IBM Garage Method provides a 7 point rating system, with 7 key metrics to measure the health of a squad (though these are not set in stone) and any other relevant metrics can and should be included to ensure you are capturing data on what is important to measure for your squad. Using the default metrics in the method, at the end of the survey from each participant you should have collected a rating from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) across the following metrics.

• Trust - I feel equipped and empowered to contribute my best to our squad.
• Health - I feel that our working pace respects a healthy work-life balance.
• Growth - I feel that the opportunities and challenges I’m working on are extending and deepening my skills.
• Safety - I feel comfortable sharing my ideas and challenges with our squad.
• Clarity - I feel that our squad shares a clear and common understanding of the goals we are trying to achieve.
• Priority - I feel that our squad is focused on ideas and challenges that will deliver the best results.
• Capability - I feel that our squad has the right knowledge, skills, and influence to deliver on our goals.

It is important that your squad come together (usually as part of the ways-of-working exercises) to discuss and agree what they view as important measures to capture and track throughout the lifetime of the squad. These metrics may change over time and may evolve, but it works best if a set of key metrics are captured and are visualized long-term.

This allows you to create that picture of your Squad Health - and start to explore the results, explore the snapshot with the team, allow for those who wish to discuss specific areas to do so and make a plan for how to address any negative trends and always be sure to recognize things that are going well.

It is useful to explore each of the metrics in a bit of detail, since the reasons for a score on the surface might not always be as straightforward or visible to you as a squad lead or scrum master and may be misleading unless explored -

A low score for “Clarity” may not necessarily be born out of misunderstanding on the goals or objectives of the squad, but might be caused by a lack of understanding on the long term goals of the project or programme and might not be directly related to the squad’s work.

There are also usually knock-on effects (both positive and negative) across the metrics, and this is why they should be explored in a bit more detail. A low score for “Trust” may not mean that your squad members are unsettled or unsure about their skills/talents/contributions to the squad - it could be that some in the squad are maybe feeling that they are lacking knowledge/clarity on their roles in the squad/team in the long-term and a low “Clarity” score has impacted your “Trust” score.

At the end of the day, it is critical that the culture of your team helps puts it in a position to succeed. Your squad should be comfortable with each other, know and trust in one another and drive towards a common goal, built out of a common understanding.

Healthy squads are typically far more engaged, collaborative, innovative and productive and the results (and often, the exercises themselves) of this targeted feedback loop can often help to improve and strengthen these key characteristics within your squad and lead to a happier, healthier, more productive team.