What if the most powerful predictor of your team’s next Sprint had nothing to do with their task list?
In our latest episode of Agile Driven Impact, I sat down with Bethany M. Planton, GPC, RSM, RPO—founder of bmpconsulting and co-founder of the #HealthyGrantPro initiative—to talk about two things most nonprofit leaders don’t measure: team happiness and stress.
Bethany’s research is hard to dispute. Three out of four grant professionals report experiencing burnout. And yet, organizations keep treating well-being as a “nice to have” rather than a performance metric. Here’s what the data actually shows: happiness precedes success. It’s a leading indicator, not a reward.
On our team, we’ve tracked happiness at every Sprint Retrospective for years. Bethany, who served as our Scrum Master, was the first person to notice a recurring dip in our happiness scores every summer—and the first to dig into why. What she uncovered changed how we take on clients: we had been onboarding too many new clients during New York State grant season, when our team was already stretched. We changed our intake policy. The dip in happiness scores disappeared.
More recently, we added a second metric—daily stress, tracked with a simple color system:
- Blue for calm
- Green for energized
- Yellow for a little stretched
- Red for “I need help”
- Brown for “send chocolate”
Collecting it takes thirty seconds. What it reveals? Invaluable.
If you’ve never formally asked your team how they’re feeling—even once a month—this episode is your starting point. Bethany’s first piece of advice: pick a cadence and just start.
Tell us in the comments: How does your team currently check in on well-being, and what do you think would change if you started tracking it?
This episode of Agile Driven Impact, which featured the interview summarized here with Bethany Planton, is proudly sponsored by Agile in Nonprofits, offering training and free downloads for nonprofits, government, and changemakers of all kinds. Check out the free Retrospective Toolkit—including fun, anonymous well-being check-in templates.