Weather forecast retrospective meeting

At Brewhouse, we generally work on about 3 projects at a time from Monday to Thursday. Every Friday morning we all meet for 30 minutes to share how the week went with the rest of the team.

We wanted this meeting to be a relaxed version of a retrospective but we found that most of us would just list what we had accomplished over the week. It was not obvious to know whether people were having a good time and if there was anything we could do, as a team, to improve happiness at work.

We decided to experiment with a weather forecast method, giving others a sense of how our week went by associating it to a weather condition, e.g. sunny, cloudy, stormy, etc.

By using this technique, our comments went from:

"This week I have added the Slack integration to Goodbits and did customer support from time to time."

to:

"It’s been a stormy week because I replied to customer as they were coming and could not really focus on developing the Slack integration for Goodbits."

The weather metaphor gives us a good idea of the team morale. The weather roundup not only focuses on what’s been achieved but highlights what could be improved and how members are feeling about their work. It is a relaxed flavour of a retrospective meeting that enables us to engage with each other’s weeks in a more personal way with the goal of improving everyone’s happiness at work!