How to Keep Your Team Motivated

yesterday my wife and i had a long talk and one of the topics we talked about was staying motivated in times like this staying motivated about the work you do and keep the team motivation high together with your teammates you might sometimes think why does it even matter why go through the trouble with all the crazy things that are happening around me that i have no control over and yet staying motivated when you work on a team is super super important the work you do helps your customers to save them time help them make more money put a smile on their face or maybe improve their lives in any other way so i hope this video will give you and your team that extra motivation that you might need right now so you can do more of the work that is important because the good news is that you don't have to do any extra work to find your motivation or to stay motivated one of the best ways to stay motivated is to focus on the things that you can control so i will explain that concept first before i show you a workshop format that will help you and your team to apply that principle on your daily work but if you just want to start with the workshop you can find the download link in the description below this video focusing on the things you can control comes from the book the seven habits of highly effective people from stephen covey you have three circles the circle of control influence and concern and the main idea is that how much work you put into something is something that you can control and that's the key to staying motivated so focus on the circle of concern and circle of influence because that's something you can directly impact if you focus on solving the problems you can control or influence one at a time you will grow your circles which will allow you to help yourself better and because of that more people around you and the things that are of your concern but that you cannot influence or control are things that you should accept and adapt to how difficult that sometimes may feel focus on growing your circles of control and influence because that will increase your motivation make you feel better and it allows you to achieve more and if this message resonates with you then hit the like button below this video because this will help to spread the word to more people who might be needing this right now now let's connect this to your team a great way to keep your team motivated is with short frequent meetings called agile retrospectives and if you're not familiar with retrospectives they are basically team meetings that give the team an opportunity to talk about and solve problems together around your technologies way of working and maybe those difficult people issues and i've created a quick workshop format which you can copy with the download link below this video to allow you and your team to focus on what you can control and this is the template it's in mido it's a digital whiteboard but if you want to you can also copy it yourself to any other tool or maybe even do it with post-its but the main idea is that we focus on the motivation of the team how might we stay motivated as a team and focusing on the things you can control help you feel better and achieve more a retrospective has a certain structure which we also follow in this board so in this case we want to break the ice and we start by asking the team why we work together as a team and the answers to this question might surprise you because everyone in the team has different needs of what they want to get out of the team some are more focused on the customers some are more focused on maybe the relationships with each other and helping each other grow as an individual and others might be more focused on the environment and having a good impact on that so do this exercise with your team give everyone the opportunity to write it down for themselves first in silence then go through the answers one by one because this will allow you to have a rich discussion about why you work together as a team it also helps people to better understand each other and it will help you feel more connected with each other then as a next step explain the circle of influence to the team so explain that the circle of control and the circle of influence is something that you can focus on and that you really can impact and the circle of concern that's something you cannot directly impact so that's something that you should accept and adapt to how difficult that sometimes made me feel so once you've introduced that circle we go to the next step which is to get a data and this is simply four questions that the team will answer on the things they can directly impact so this shifts the attention of the team to things that are really in their circle of influence in the circle of control and because of that you will only talk about the things that you can directly influence as a team and be aligned on how you want to move forward from that moment the first question is how will we know we are successful in three months so give everyone the opportunity to silently write all ideas down for themselves in the quadrants one thought per sticky note and for this quadrant you want ideally to have some sticky notes where there are numbers on it because this way you can actually measure three months from now if you made the progress that you hoped you would make the second quadrant the second question is focused on what you can eliminate maybe your team is doing tasks that are not relevant anymore or maybe they're working late because of a high pressure there is or maybe you're doing back-to-back meetings by allowing the team to write down things they think that can be eliminated you give an opportunity to have a discussion about the things that maybe are something that you do as a habit but are not bringing any value anymore the third question is about how can we reduce our workload what can we do different and that can be done maybe by prioritizing the backlog or the amount of work differently give other tasks or other projects in a higher priority but it could also be to maybe delegate tasks to someone else in the company or another team so that you can focus on the things that are important for your team right now and the fourth question is how can we be more productive how can we improve our productivity and there are always opportunities to be more productive for example by automating tasks that are repetitive or maybe by writing down the best practices in your playbook so that other people of the team can also benefit from it or maybe even people outside of the team and of course the frequent the quick weekly team meetings the retrospectives they will help you to talk about the things that are important that week and once everyone has filled in their answers they can do a quick voting session give everyone two votes and allow them to vote on the things they find most important for example in this case maybe i find this one really important and the topics with the most votes these are the ones that you bring to the next exercise which is called a lean coffee which is basically a quick exercise you can do to talk about the topics that are most voted you start with the one with the most votes so in this case this one had two you drag it over here and you focus on that topic for the next eight minutes and once the time is up or if you have the feeling that you can move forward to the next topic you put up your thumbs so yes if you want to continue or no let's go to the next one and in this way you can have a quick structured conversation about the topics that you voted on and during that conversation it's important to write down any action items that you hear in that conversation so in this case maybe prepare a plan for the next team weekly meetings because you want to end a retrospective always with concrete action items and that's basically it there's also a quick checkout to ask the team how motivated they feel right now after doing the workshop they can use a smiley over here to indicate how motivated they feel and also write down on a post-it why they gave that score this is a great way to close the retrospective and to see if there's extra work needed to be done outside of the retrospective outside of the workshop and that's the whole workshop it's something you can do in 30 to 45 minutes depending on the topics that you want to talk about and how fast you're going through them and if you're not doing so already plan your short frequent retrospectives with your team because the longer the distance is between the team meetings the more a team starts to drift off track this right here is a youtube playlist with all the videos that are made about retrospectives it has more templates like the one you just saw and lots of tips and tricks about helping your team being more productive for example there's this one about atomic habits which helps you to improve one percent every day and be 37 times more productive one year from now