This is an idea for a way to track the health of a team. It’s pretty abstract so I’ll need to test it in real life, my guess is that it’ll work.

Tl;dr: People have complex, interesting lives outside work. They’ll be better at work if you allow them to remain interesting. This is one way to do it without crossing privacy boundaries.

Everyone has a different definition of success in their life. I’ve never actually heard anyone admit that getting rich and owning an Aston Martin motivates them. (This might just be the people I hang around with.) After having a good hard think, most people come up with something like:

I want to feel excited to go to work

or

I’d like a general sense of pride in what I’ve achieved

But that only really covers the work related goals. For a lot of people work is a means to an end. That end might be doing as much skydiving, or spending as much time with their kids, as possible. Whatever that external goal is, people are going to feel better if they are hitting it.

My feeling is that if people feel better in general, that they’ll be better at their job. (This is the key assumption here that I need to test.)

The way I see this working is that each person would pick a Magical Mystery Metric to track that as a number. What that metric recorded would be entirely up to the person. They’d probably need to have a guided way of getting to that goal. It needs to represent what they want, not just what they felt that society wanted them to want.

Then their team lead would see the graphs. They’d have no label on the y axis, so all they’d see was trends. I’ve made a simulated version of how this might look on a dashboard:

These values are all scaled to fit on the same axis. They might be entered in radically different values. E.g. someone might record meters swum that day and report it as a rolling average over 7 days. Someone else might record number of blog posts written as a rolling average over a month. What matters is that they are quantifiable, and scaled to the same axis.

The idea is that if you’ve got a bunch of other metrics on your dashboard you’ll be able to see if there are any trends. You might be losing one person, they might be overloaded at work or have some kind of crisis at home that they are ‘dealing with’. Or you might see your whole team’s values decline as you crank hard for a deadline.

It’s OK that people’s numbers will go up and down. As a team lead, it’s the trends that are interesting. At the level of whole organisations it would allow you to see if specific teams are struggling. You could even to see how the mood of the whole organisation is doing!

There will need to be periodic checkins so that people can reassess their metric. Maybe I record how many push ups I do each day, but my life changes and I want to record how often I cook dinner at home. That’s fine, but your metric needs to represent your goals as they are now, not as they were. (As a nice side effect, it will keep people’s goals in their minds.)

I have a strong suspicion that this will work, but it really needs to be tried. If you want to give it a go, then let me know and I’d be very happy to help you set it up.