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Ask HN: Do you talk about mood in your team?

3 points by adamwi ↗ HN
After working in a number of different teams I have experienced a lot different ways of working. Many things are common across teams, e.g. most teams have some type of short daily team meeting.

But one area which differs a lot between teams is mood discussions. In some teams it was discussed every day as part of the morning meeting (everyone share their mood) while in other teams it was never mentioned.

My personal experience is that the mood discussions are very valuable, e.g. help unearthing frustrations early and thereby create a better team atmosphere. What are your experiences, do you discuss mood in your team? Do you find it useful or is it just oversharing?

3 comments

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dudul
Interesting, I've never seen that. Can you give an example of such a discussion? What would you share specifically?
adamwi
Example from one of the development teams, "Frustrated as the testing server went down again yesterday when I deployed the new code".

This would then be que for the team to really get to the bottom with the testing servers. In this particular organization the servers were handled by another team and it needed some management attention to really fix the issue.

Other topics could be more subtle, e.g. colleague feeling a bit low due to personal reasons. Would then allow team members to more supportive that day.

dudul
OK, the former yeah I've definitely seen. It's kind of common sense I guess to share very annoying things like that to make sure we take the time to fix them.

The latter, never done before. That's interesting though. I like the idea of letting everybody know that today you may behave like an ahole because you have problems at home, or your car just died or something. I'll absolutely try it :)