Team Retrospective with Shout Outs

Reflection and improvement are key to iterative, agile teams who are collaborating on projects or sprints. A frequent team retrospective session is an ideal moment to reflect on what happened, but can often too easily lead to a focus on negativity. This can hamper team psychological safety.

By introducing an expectation for team members to call out those who have contributed positively, team members can feel happier about progress being made and therefore encourage productivity. I call these shout outs!

I invite you to take advantage of this tried and tested method which has recently supported teams at VMware Tanzu Labs across the world.

Tips

• The retrospective template is confined to a single Miro frame which makes it easy to duplicate or manipulate to your needs.

• The template contains step by step suggested instructions based on a 45 minute timescale. However, these are recommendations and can be adjusted based on your team size and time available.

• I highly recommend running this retrospective at weekly intervals for busy teams or hands on sprints.

• Don't forget to allocate ample time to create actions to pursue going forward, based on the information collected.

• Adopt a casual tone of voice to allow team members to be open, honest and comfortable to share.

Additional Information

To find out more about the story behind the concept of Team Retrospectives with Shout Outs, check out my article on our company blog.

Special thanks to Antonia Horvath for their inspiration and support :)