COVID-19 is forcing people to work from home and managers are facing a new challenge: leading virtual teams. But how can I measure the mood of the virtual teams without constantly calling everyone. Constant calling is important, but if you overdo it, it annoys the employee and costs the management too much time.
Reading tip: Control of remote work
You can also only reach individual opinions by calling and do not understand the real system. As a manager, however, you should work on the overall system instead of on minor details. But how does it work?
Reading tip: Managers are like gardeners
Nice Peter Drucker (2004) said: “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and it is especially important in virtual teams to check the culture and values despite the distance. I found the Spotify Healthcheck model for this (cf. Spotify 2020 and illustration). This includes a deck of cards with selected values, which you can adapt flexibly and check the satisfaction of the individual teams every 14 days using traffic lights.
Tip: Download the template like here and adjust them!
A representative of the team communicates the current mood in the team to you through traffic light colors. The teams choose between the three traffic light colors (red, yellow, green). The indicators on the cards provide information on this. Now pack all the results in a table (see Figure 31). The respective columns help the team leaders to recognize the mood in the team. For example: Team 2 is happy with pretty much everything. Team 3 has many problems, but there is a positive trend for almost all points (see figure).
In the ranks I can as Department heads recognize patterns, i.e. work on the overall system instead of on the individual team. Figure 31 shows: Every team has fun at work (and the trend is going even further up!). Motivation doesn’t seem to be a problem. However, the processes cause problems. Over time, that will certainly be the case affect the fun factor at work.
Also measure whether there are more traffic lights e.g. Were green than in the previous survey. If that is the case, then it works Upward trend. This shows whether a status has changed and in which way Direction so you can react. In the overall picture you can see that many Arrows point up. This means that the improvement process (the most important process of all) works.
Tip: Use an open source tool such as Lime Survey or Oh My Form for the technical implementation. Then the sensitive data is also safely stored!
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