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What is Scrum?
Scrum is one of the largest parts of Agile, and involves clear roles (below), time-boxed work deliverables (two-week iterations) and a daily scrum meeting (15 minute stand-up).
- The Product Owner
- The Development Team
- The Scrum Master
The Daily Scrum is checking in for a 15-minute stand-up progress meeting.
Stanford Health Care
Stanford Health Care struggled with losing talent in a highly competitive market and an Employee Engagement score of 42%. They had leaders focus checking in – frequent, light touch conversations about near-term future work. The more they checked in, the higher engagement was.
Fully Engaged staff members increased by 10% after just three months, and increased 14% in 7 months.
Gallup
In 2009 the Gallup Business Journal asked a random sample of 1,003 U.S. employees whether their manager focused on their strengths or weaknesses.
They found that there was a 59% drop in engagement when team-mates felt ignored by their manager.
Clarity of Roles and Work
Gallup
In 2015 the Gallup Business Journal studied more than 190,000 employee engagement responses and found that 50% of employees were not clear on what was expected of them at work.
Of these, only 4% were “engaged” in their work.
Companies where employees were clear on what was expected of them saw a 34% jump in engaged employees.
In 2012 a Google project called “Aristotle” studied 180 project and engineering teams. They found the highest performing teams all had this trait in common:
“Structure and clarity: An individual’s understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling these expectations, and the consequences of one’s performance are important for team effectiveness. Goals must be specific, challenging, and attainable.”
– David McLachlan