• Home
  • BVSSH
  • Engineering Enablement
  • Playbooks
  • Frameworks
  • Good Reads
Search

What are you looking for?

Standard : Team health indicators are reviewed alongside delivery metrics

Purpose and Strategic Importance

This standard ensures that team health indicators-such as morale, workload, and burnout risk-are reviewed alongside delivery metrics. It enables leaders to balance outcomes with wellbeing, sustaining high performance over time.

Aligned to our "Balance Sustainability with Speed" policy, this standard creates space for dialogue, reflection, and support. Without it, teams risk burning out in pursuit of output, undermining long-term success.

Strategic Impact

  • Improved consistency and quality across teams
  • Reduced operational friction and delivery risks
  • Stronger ownership and autonomy in technical decision-making
  • More inclusive and sustainable engineering culture

Risks of Not Having This Standard

  • Slower time-to-value and increased rework
  • Accumulation of inconsistency and process debt
  • Reduced trust in engineering data, systems, or ownership
  • Loss of agility in the face of change or failure

CMMI Maturity Model

  • Level 1 – Initial: Team health is not formally monitored. Focus remains solely on delivery outputs, with wellbeing concerns raised reactively or not at all.

  • Level 2 – Managed: Some teams discuss morale or workload, but insights are anecdotal and not linked to delivery performance. Support is informal and varies widely.

  • Level 3 – Defined: Team health indicators (e.g. burnout risk, engagement, workload balance) are reviewed regularly alongside delivery metrics. Processes are documented and encouraged across teams.

  • Level 4 – Quantitatively Managed: Health and delivery data are combined to identify trends, risks, and opportunities for intervention. Wellbeing insights shape coaching, resourcing, and delivery planning.

  • Level 5 – Optimising: Team health is a core input into strategic decisions. Feedback loops improve sustainability practices, and performance is balanced with wellbeing as part of an adaptive engineering culture.


Key Measures

  • Adoption rates and coverage across teams
  • Impact on delivery metrics, quality, or team health
  • Evidence of ownership, governance, or learning loops
Associated Policies
  • Balance Sustainability with Speed
  • Measure & Validate Value
Associated Practices
  • Collaborative Story Refinement
  • Engineering Onboarding Playbooks
  • Guilds & Chapters
  • Dev-Product Pairing
  • Engineering Office Hours
  • Mob Programming
  • Pair Programming
  • Psychological Safety Practices
  • Retrospective Action Loops
  • Shared Learning Days
  • Swarming on Issues
  • Tech Talks & Showcases

Technical debt is like junk food - easy now, painful later.

Awesome Blogs
  • LinkedIn Engineering
  • Github Engineering
  • Uber Engineering
  • Code as Craft
  • Medium.engineering