More than a year into the pandemic, employee morale, team happiness and mood-tracking have never been more important. Business leaders are looking for ways to nurture employee engagement and improve well-being especially in the case of distributed teams where this becomes even more challenging.
To help out, we put together a quick guide to engaging with your team around this topic.
Why?
Tracking moods of your employees will not only give you a sense of how your team is feeling but it will also initiate conversations about performance and satisfaction, leading to better communication, creating empathy and bringing the team closer together.
Where?
From the simple Niko-Niko calendar to sophisticated devices, technology has found plenty of ways for you to track your team’s mood. You can also try our own tool: AION Teams, a shared calendar where your team members can share their location and their mood for the day.
When?
There are different ways a team can connect around their moods. You can take a few minutes from your daily morning standup to discuss how you’re starting the day or your mood from the day before. You can alternatively organize a weekly check-in meeting for this purpose or simply leave it to each individual to reach out to others when they feel the need. We advise you to try different formats out to check which format works best for your team and your setup.
How?
Motivating the team to register their daily mood, without any self-censorship, is no easy task. As a leader, you need to instill a culture of openness, transparency and empathy. You need to clearly communicate to your team members that, for example, being in a bad mood does not necessarily mean that you are not productive. It is very important to dissociate mood and performance.
As a leader, you also need to be the role model when it comes to sharing openly. Our CEO remembers a day where she was really sad about the passing of a dear friend. She had a choice between leaving that out of the conversation or mentioning it to the team, which she felt would surely lead to her crying on their daily standup call. By choosing to open up about it, and share her sadness, she was hoping to create a space where everyone would feel comfortable doing the same if they needed it.
In essence, being aware of your teammates' mood has become even more important amid the coronavirus crisis and the dominance of remote working, and with more companies permanently switching to remote or hybrid working models, managers and team members need a tool that will help them be on top of their mental well-being and enable open conversations that will lead to better inclusion, productivity and work happiness.
Comments