The current state of your Development Team

If you're a manager of a software development project, how do you gauge the morale and mood of the team? I mentioned in a previous post that my boss recently took the direct approach and asked us all to answer a series of questions relating to our morale and such.

For this approach to work though, I'm pretty certain everyone needs to be honest. Given the current working environment (high unemployment, worry of layoffs, pay cuts, etc.), its unlikely that many, if any of the team members provided accurate results. There's just too high a risk that the information could be used maliciously. Personally, I provided a lot of well thought out responses that are true, but I certainly didn't share all of my thoughts on the questions and I carefully edited the responses. Wouldn't you?

I suppose the answer to that question is “It depends on the situation.” What kind of work environment is it, what's the culture of the company, what's the history of the company, what is the management team like, and how the question was asked. In some corporations, the level of distrust between management and employees may be too high to get useful responses from an employee directly.

But surely there are other ways to find out the current state of your team besides asking the team members directly? None of my other managers has ever asked the team what their morale is directly like my current manager, but surely they still had a good idea of what the team's morale was like?

And I think the answer to that is quite simple; all of my previous managers tried to engage the team members in meetings or in hallways. By talking to each members of the team on a regular basis over a long period of time, they were able to discern when the attitude of the team had turned sour and try to improve it when needed.

But as a manager, asking employees directly is probably not the best approach unless you're certain your team trusts you enough not to use the information maliciously.