Have you ever wondered whether team health is a factor in building stronger, high-performing teams?

The answers to this question might seem simple. As an Agile Team Lead for CBC Digital, I’ve been experimenting with different metrics and measurements to find an accurate answer for this question, rather than saying, “the team is doing great or they are performing well.”

The simplest logic is to think that if you’re sick or stressed out, you will not be able to perform as well. The same theory applies to your Agile teams. OKRs, KPIs, and velocity are good tools to measure performance, yet I’ve found “health and well-being” is the most important indicator of team performance.

Here’s how I apply the Agile mindset with my teams to ensure they work within a psychologically safe space, all while having a great time together:

1. Understand the team culture

As a leader and a coach to your team, you need to know your team dynamics. These are some of the areas to probe:

• How creative are they when it comes to problem-solving?
• What areas do they need guidance to improve?
• What have you learned through your 1:1s about their concerns and what makes them happy?
• How safe do they feel within the team?
• How accountable and committed are they?

2. Provide clear direction and have a proper team structure

Defining your team’s purpose and direction through a structured development/execution plan can help maintain focus and stability. Also, providing opportunities for employees to take on more leadership roles within the team helps teach shared responsibility and accountability. Your team will feel supported to pursue various avenues and to continue to grow in their career paths.

3. Encourage Teamwork

The foundation of a healthy team is to ensure that people trust one another and communicate openly. They should be:

• Collaborating and freely participate in conversations
• Listening willingly and actively
• Engaging in constructive conflict resolution and problem-solving

4. Be a good listener

Understanding your team’s concerns is a proven way to keep your team motivated. A simple expression of appreciation helps to build a healthy team dynamic, which drives productivity. Be there to motivate and encourage them. Invite them to share their ideas. And support them in their training needs as they reach to achieve their career goals. Celebrating the wins together, and solving problems as a team will help to improve everyone.

5. Commit to team checkups
Having 1:1s with team members at least once a month helps to build safe and strong connections. A healthy rapport with your team is vital to having constructive conversations.

6. Abandon traditional retrospectives

Instead of trying to generate lessons learned for the next sprint/project, experimenting with new retrospective ideas can be an opportunity to identify what the team can do better and what can be improved to increase the team’s capacity for the future…

7. Establish team health metrics

The quarterly metrics I use include team-building exercises, team health checks, performance surveys to learn about loopholes in the product roadmap or objectives that were not discussed during a retro. It’s also important to introduce team best practices in order to provide guidance and to be referenced at will. Communication matrices can be useful in understanding how the team feels about rituals, meetings, experiments in place, etc.

Throughout the past few years in my role as an Agile Team Lead, through frequent experimentation, I discovered that having superstars on the team or having the best skill sets are not the only important factors in building a high performing team. What I’ve observed is that the secret lies in the more intangible factors, such as the bonds and trust forged within its members that make teams highly successful. Striving to build a psychologically safe environment and ensuring that team members are happy physically, mentally, and socially is what builds a healthy team, and consequently, a high performing product team.

To join our teams at CBC, check out our current openings here.

Are Healthy Teams also High performing Teams? was originally published in CBC Digital Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two brains are often better than one — and this is why we decided to experiment with pair programming.

Pair programming is an Agile approach where two programmers work together at one computer writing the same piece of code. Let’s return to the car metaphor. The driver is the developer at the keyboard who writes the actual code, while the navigator is the second developer who guides the direction of the code, reviews the code as it is created and focuses on the broader strategic direction of its implementation.

As the Agile Team Lead for CBC’s Analytics & Search team — the team responsible for tracking Canadian behavioural signals on our digital platforms — I’m always looking for ways to increase our productivity. We’re a positive group and work diligently, but I observed a pattern of work spilling over at the end of sprints, leaving some tickets incomplete.

I also noticed that some team members were more comfortable doing analytics-related tasks while others were more comfortable doing our search-based tasks. To rebalance the load and share our knowledge, we decided to experiment with pair programming and mix our development and QA duties. Our goal: reduce task spillover at the end of a sprint and increase knowledge pooling within the team.

While some people are critical of the practice, suggesting it makes coding take twice as long, we found the opposite to be true. By the end of the exercise, our team was more energetic and enthusiastic in reaching our sprint goal.

These were the four main benefits:

1. Increased team collaboration:

Chances are, the majority of developers have faced roadblocks solving problems, only to have a colleague quickly glance over their work and find a solution. Pair programming provides a second set of eyes at all times and facilitates collaboration that leads to creative and efficient solutions.

2. Develop higher quality solutions:

Having both a navigator and driver on a task lets our team members focus on better ways to optimize a solution. Developers bring their different experiences and expertise to generate a wider range of solutions than they would when working alone.

3. Pool team knowledge:

One of the biggest benefits we found was giving our junior team members more exposure to the code base. Our juniors were able to rapidly grow in this environment, and our seniors were exposed to new and innovative perspectives. By sharing QA duties, each team member was given some exposure to every task of a sprint.

4. Productivity and accountability:

We all have times during the day when we get distracted and lose focus, especially when working alone on a task. Sometimes procrastination sets in and we need someone to hold us accountable. With the pair programming approach, both parties hold each other accountable to stay productive, and both parties are able to share the load.

Despite the benefits of this approach, we also found some challenges. Learning to do both QA and development in a pair programming environment requires individuals to be open to working with anyone at any skill level. It requires maturity, patience and a humble environment where egos are thrown aside.

Combining the work of developers and QA testers was a significant learning curve for everyone involved. To address this, we decided to use our 20 per cent time (time dedicated to innovation, learning and reduction of technical debt) to learn the necessary QA tools and programming languages through online courses and knowledge transfer within the team. Looking back, we can proudly say that each member of the team now has the knowledge and skills to both test and develop.

Altogether, experimenting with new approaches has been a positive experience for our team. As a group and as individuals, trying out new concepts and strategies has helped us gain knowledge and experience, grow as developers and QA testers, overcome hurdles and take on bold new challenges. We love the new approaches we took and we feel it is the best way for our team to develop solutions in a collaborative Agile environment.

It takes two: How pair programming helped our team become stronger and more confident was originally published in CBC Digital Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.