PETALS - a simple framework to improve team health

Improve your team health & culture with PETALS

A simple framework to help continuously improve tech team's health

Why use PETALS?

Do you find your team's morale peaks and troughs without any direction?

Have you observed teams you lead struggle to identify improvement areas?

Are teams you're working with suggesting they're awesome but can't pinpoint why?

PETALS is a framework to help improve team health, rapidly and regularly, with a tried and tested method from large tech organisations.

How does PETALS work?

Focus on five key metrics to identify continuous improvement

Identify 5 key dimensions for your team's health

Rate PRODUCTIVITY, ENJOYMENT, TEAMWORK, LEARNING and SERENITY from your recent iteration to calculate the team's overall AVERAGE (hence the acronym PETALS)

Collect individual scores rapidly and regularly

Setup or use existing regular team meetings (recommend weekly but fortnightly and monthly also works, Agile retrospectives are perfect). Ask everyone to rate 5 dimensions out of 5. Use a standard form with simple star ratings.

Review collective averages

Calculate AVERAGES across the team for each dimension for overall team health view. What are the trends on last time and over time? Any outliers to call out? Is the team safe enough to discuss individual scores? Discuss as a group, celebrate successes & identify possible improvement areas.

Discuss & act

Elaborate on key topics from the shared scores. Determine root cause, use real examples to understand specific scenarios, time-box each discussion to ensure every topic gets fair coverage. Agree on next steps with owners and goal dates.

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Where did PETALS come from?

Si Jobling is an experienced Engineering Manager, former Agile Delivery Manager and Web Engineer. He has worked across a variety of organisations at different scales and context, from the UK to USA and China, always driving for healthy open cultures in tech.

With over 20 years experience of hands on software engineering and leadership, he knows what makes for healthy engineering teams and software engineers. He originally designed PETALS as a personal framework to regularly reflect on his working week. As he extended the model to the teams he led, it quickly grew in popularity for its simplicity and power for both teams and leadership, gaining attention from popular publications like EMHub and big name brands.

PETALS