Retro time!
We have a team lunch every couple of weeks and the last one we had for the year included a team retrospective. We had delicious savoury mazniks and our standard coffee of choice while we reflected on the year. We started off with listing the "happies" of 2022 from each team member followed by the "sads". Then we had a third list where we jot down the "actions" to take for improvements. I walked away feeling great about what we have achieved throughout the year, how everybody felt with where we are at as a company as well as a team, and where we need to focus on next year.
Retrospectives (retros for short) are a common type of meeting held at the end of each sprint cycle. Retrospectives can also be run at the completion of a project or chunk of work. They can also be run periodically to review how the team or company operate. Does your team or company have a ritual like this?
Retrospectives facilitate communication and reflection as a team. Doing so on a regular basis can help create transparency and trust, boost morale, and empower team members. It can also help to identify issues and bottlenecks, improve learning and adapting to change, and save projects. If you don't make the time to reflect, some things won’t come to the surface as soon as they could, and some may never come up at all.
So how do you run a good retro? Set the scene by defining ground rules. Provide a basic framework to collect people’s reflections of what’s working and what isn’t. Allow enough time to talk through these reflections. Take note and action anything important. You can run retros online using various tools, templates, and products. Or you can use some good old paper and post-it notes and let people walk around the room and add their thoughts. Whichever format you choose, make sure it is simple enough that your team focuses on their reflections rather the mechanics. Consistency is key so set a regular frequency for your retros, put it in a shared calendar, and stick to it.
Hope you had a good retro of late and all the best for 2023!