Mood tracking: 11 free resources to set it up and use it to implement healthy team dynamics

The 3 challenges of Roland and Andy

Roland is a supervisor of a feature systems engineering team for a global automotive company. He has technical responsibilities but is also a people leader and manages a team of 10 people. TeamMood is also used by more departments and more than a hundred people there.

Andy is an Agile Coach and Senior Scrum Master at a Fortune 50 company. He serves multiple cross-functional software development teams (composed of engineers, UI/UX designers, product owners, testers, etc...) who are building a national ecommerce platform.

Both were facing similar challenges:

1. No way to monitor team morale
2. A desire to improve team dynamics
3. Difficulty of team bonding remotely

They both chose to use TeamMood to solve these challenges.

Andy: “A lot of companies experiment with ways of measuring and visualizing how their teams are doing (KPI’s, ROV’s, NPS, etc.,) looking for areas where there are opportunities for improvement. The general idea being you can’t improve what you don’t measure. And without some sort of systemic approach with clear visualization – things would very much be a guessing game. TeamMood provides just that.”

Reminder: what is mood tracking?

It’s the action of asking the team at regular intervals how they feel.

A more evolved way to do it is to also ask for comments related to the mood.

There are different tools and techniques to track mood:

• Niko-niko calendar: It’s a calendar where each team member puts a smiley related to their mood every day.
• Dedicated tools like TeamMood: in this case, you’ve got nothing to set up or know, TeamMood will send an email to each team member every day to ask for their mood. It acts similarly to a niko-niko calendar but digitally.
• Retrospectives: Some retrospective formats like the “Sad Mad Glad” format can be used to share feelings and over multiple retrospectives track mood.
• Team health checks: It is a self-assessment technique used to gauge feelings of the team over multiple areas at regular intervals.

Challenge #1: Team morale monitoring

Managers generally start looking into mood tracking for a simple reason: they want to check whether their teammates are happy or sad.

And in turn, it lets them lead the team and projects better.

Here’s how Andy puts it:

Andy: “A team’s mood is a leading indicator of what’s going to happen soon. A happy team is an engaged, performing team. Such a team creates better solutions with higher quality than a consistently unhappy team."
" On the other hand, if the mood of the team is dropping, I can be pretty sure that without some intervention a drop in productivity will follow. Seeing a downward trend gives me the opportunity to respond proactively.

Challenge #2: Team dynamics

Here’s what team dynamics is: it’s the relationships and interactions between a group of people who work together to accomplish a shared goal.

And it’s not possible without getting regular feedback from your teammates.

Most companies only have very sparse employee surveys that are by far not enough and it’s up to the managers to find a better solution.

Here’s how Roland describes the problem with the biannual surveys they had in his company:

Roland: “It's a very high level tool because you don't really see verbatim comments from people. You don't see what their actual issues are. Respondents may answer a particular question negatively, but it's very hard to find out why. Also as it’s only twice a year, you have to wait several months for the results to come in. Then you interpret the results and try to identify what we could do to make improvements in those areas. So the whole process takes a long time and is open to interpretation.”

To summarize: data from these surveys are unusable.

And that’s why mood tracking tools like TeamMood are attractive to managers like Roland: you get unbiased feedback from your teammates every single day.

Challenge #3: Remote team bonding

The last challenge is more specifically a remote or hybrid challenge. Team bonding often happens during breaks to the point of having the “water cooler effect” as an expression.

For those who don’t know about it: it’s the tendency of employees to gather informally around a water cooler in order to socialize and share information.

But how do you foster team bonding remotely?

Slack is an option but it’s not the best tool to share everything with everybody.

Mood tracking tools like TeamMood answer this perfectly as you can have anonymous discussions around various topics.

Roland: “The problem could be “an issue at home” which helps me to recognise that someone may have things going on that I can not help with directly, but can always offer a chat if they are willing to speak up.”

TeamMood solves all these challenges

To solve these 3 challenges, you need:

• A distributed niko-niko calendar
• Remote water cooler
• And anonymity

Options that have all these capabilities are very limited. That’s why Andy and Roland favored TeamMood.

Andy: “TeamMood makes it easy to gather data daily, and by using tags, drill down to specific functions or roles for a large team. And even track multiple teams. And then I can visualize trends over time and identify inflexion points. Seeing the pulse of the teams with such clarity gives me the opportunity to be a better coach - responding in near real time.”

And with TeamMood, there’s a lot of things they are able to do.

Use case #1: Run retrospective efficiently

Andy uses TeamMood to prepare retrospectives. By using the feedback he gets every day from TeamMood, he’s able to find the most important topics to discuss during the next retrospective and this way the retrospectives are organized and efficient.

Andy: “I’ll tap into the comments when designing an upcoming retrospective. And as a team we can discuss making sure we don’t lose the elements that contribute to happiness, and that we strive to reduce or eliminate that things that make us sad.”

Use case #2: Team health checks

Roland runs weekly meetings to look at TeamMood’s data. They’re akin to team health checks. They can discuss different topics they talked about in the comments of TeamMood during the week to expand on them and reflect on the trends.

Roland: “Every week within our team of ten, we look at the last week’s data on TeamMood. We look at some of the comments to see how we're doing, how the trend is, whether we've had a good week or a not-so-good week.”

Another thing Roland does is making sure successes are celebrated. We tend to focus on solving problems and skipping celebrations, but praise is important.

Roland: “The other thing we do in our team meetings is we look at the successes from the last week. So, you know, everybody encourages everybody to come up with what success they’ve had in the last week. And it doesn't have to be a work success. It could be a personal success. It’s important because in an engineering and product development environment, we're often working on resolving issues and fixing problems. We maybe had five new problems come up this week, but we were successful in delivering another ten.”

Use case #3: Better daily stand-ups

Roland uses comments from TeamMood to drive daily stand-ups too. This way, the important topics that must be addressed during the stand-up are known beforehand and it makes stand-ups more straightforward.

Roland: “I encourage them to always put in a comment. Not everybody does it every day, but I always try to put a comment in. It could be that something at work has not gone well, or somebody didn't turn up for a meeting, or they felt not supported by somebody else, or a test vehicle was delayed and they couldn't conduct the testing they wanted to do.”

Use case #4: Proactive project management

Monitoring team mood over time is really useful to react quickly when there’s a problem in a sprint or during a project. No need to wait for a retrospective.

Andy: “Is it time for a happy hour mid sprint? Or an hour break for some serious play-time? With TeamMood it’s easy for a scrum master to know!”

Use case #5: Fostering psychological safety

By getting moods and comments from the team more regularly, Roland is able to help his teammates more and that makes them feel listened to, which in turn increases engagement to provide even more comments and be more open.

Roland: “So I think that just helps to make people realize that they are being listened to. They're not just typing in and it goes into TeamMood. We are actually looking at it daily.”