Everything seems cool these days if we try to trend it using a hashtag symbol, hence #EmotiveRetros.
What’s #EmotiveRetros all about?
A while ago I wrote an article describing a YouTube retrospective technique that I experimented with. It was all about getting people to focus on how they felt during a sprint, rather than just the ‘how did the sprint go?’ type of retro. The idea was that by getting people to think about the emotions, it’ll provide much more valuable points to improve upon.
Make sense? Great, that’s pretty much all I have to say! Now just to back myself up a bit, so you don’t think I’m waffling…
Quite often we get into a rut of doing the same thing for retrospectives. I know it, and I’m guilty of it too – we use the same technique, usually end up coming up with the same or similar actions, and in the end those actions are out of hand of the dev team or yourself as a Scrum Master, so they just become accepted facts.
Actually no, that’s not the point of a retrospective. At least not how I see it.
Employee Happiness is Key
More and more, companies are recognising the value of employee happiness. Why do you think large firms such as Google, Facebook and Netflix are known to have such amazing perks such as great office facilities, generous holidays, various benefits, etc.? It’s to keep their employee happiness up, as well as to obviously provide great attractions to potential talent. What’s more powerful for a company is to keep their employees engaged, interested, motivated and happy on a day to day basis. Without delving into their emotions, how else are you going to find out about all of that?
Companies are already trying to engage employees’ emotions in different ways. Traditional ‘one-to-one’ meetings are dying a slow death, as companies such as Accenture and Atlassian have shown by using their own methods of catch ups and appraisals. These tend to centre around the sole question of, “how are things going?” Such an open-ended question can elicit different types of responses, but in general it’s more likely to bring out an emotive response when used as part of normal human interaction. Please don’t use that question in the context of how a project is going, since the value is then lost!
So next time you’re facilitating a retrospective, have a think about how you can engage the emotions of the team and increase their happiness by addressing their feelings, rather than shying away from them.
For an example retrospective technique to elicit emotion, check out my YouTube Retrospective Technique.