15/5 Reports

15/5 Reports

To manage teams in a way that fosters psychological safety requires clear communication and feedback channels. Team members should have well-defined platforms to share achievements, voice concerns, and seek assistance. Ideally, these feedback mechanisms will be consistent, high-cadence and light-touch, enabling early identification of issues in a manner that’s straightforward, low-risk, and routine for team members.

What are 15/5 Reports?

15/5 reports are a great example of a practical tool to achieve this, and this week, we’re going to dive into them, as a way to improve performance and error-catching in a team, alongside fostering psychological safety.

These 15/5 reports were originally created by Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, and (I think) were inspired by the Scrum standup questions. Yvon Chouinard recognised that he was out of the office a lot, so he needed a way to get the information he needed quickly without placing too much burden on those reporting. By asking team members to complete 15/5s on a weekly basis, he could keep a regular information pulse across teams and the organisation. They’re called 15/5s because they should take no more than 15 minutes to write, and 5 minutes to read.

Ensuring that everyone knows what’s going on in an organisation is hard. Finding time for regular synchronous meetings in busy calendars can be really hard, especially when colleagues are working across different time zones or have different working patterns. No one wants onerous reports to write (or read!) but many people do find it easier to communicate in writing because it gives them more time to think about what they’re saying and how to say it. 15/5s can provide an ideal vehicle for easy, concise sharing.

15/5 reports consist essentially of a few core questions, such as the ones below. These are the core questions (or variations of) that I’ve used throughout my career as a manager since I first came across 15/5s in 2013. 

15/5 Report Core Questions

1. What are your main achievements this week? What are you most proud of or satisfied with?

This question kicks the report off with a positive note. Team members can be invited to add non-work achievements too – whatever they feel good about that week. In tough times, it might simply be “I’ve made it through so far.”

2. Is there anything worrying or concerning you in or outside of work?

This is a critical question. And it’s ok if the answer is “nothing”, but make sure you keep asking it, because the time will come when people have concerns and this makes it clear that it’s ok, and expected, that they raise them.

You can address anything raised here in your regular 1-1s (you are having regular weekly or biweekly 1-1s, right?…) and if multiple people raise the same concern, you can get in front of it before it becomes too big.

Of course, team members should also know they don’t need to wait for a 15/5 to raise any major or urgent concerns.

3. How are you feeling, and what is the morale of your team around you?

This is a good temperature check for individual wellbeing and team culture. It will also highlight if and where there are differences between team members – some may feel everything is great, while others are struggling. It may take weeks or months before people begin to answer this question honestly, but it’s really important. 

4. Is there anything I could do better or differently that would help you?

As a leader, it’s critical that you frequently and consistently ask for feedback. Again, this question may take many weeks or months before you receive anything constructive, because it may take time for people to recognise that it’s safe to give you feedback. Remember that when you do get it, it’s essential you visibly welcome it and act on it. 

Implementing 15/5 Reports in your team

In their first few 15/5s, people may not be particularly candid or open. But as time progresses, and this becomes a habit, people will begin to feel psychologically safer to be more honest. This only works, however, if you respond productively and with kindness to what people write – even (especially) if it’s feedback for you. Be sure to respond to every single report – even if it’s a quick acknowledgement and thanks – because it’s very demotivating for people to write 15/5s without receiving a response, and will rapidly mean people stop sending them or send very dry reports without substance.

I encourage team members to send 15/5s on a Thursday afternoon, but to start writing them on a Monday morning, and add bits in as they occurred to them, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. You can choose the timing that works best for your team. Ideally, the cadence should align with your 1-1 meeting cadence, so that the reports inform your 1-1s. 

Even if you have around ten or more people sending reports to you, this is a great, and very lean, method of ensuring you can support your team as effectively as possible. If you provide your manager with a 15/5, it also means you can push information upwards (or backwards, depending on how you think about your org structure!) or across to other team members and managers. 

As a team member, you don’t need permission to start doing 15/5 reports.

There’s no reason you can’t start doing these for your manager. Chances are, once you start doing them, your manager will recognise the value and begin to love them (and you for starting them)! At worst, if your manager doesn’t engage, they can be a great format for your own regular reflections on work.

Variations in 15/5 implementation:

You might decide that everyone in the team shares their 15/5 with everyone else. This is fantastic, but be aware that there are often personal issues that are brought up in 15/5 reports that people may not want other team members to know about. Especially if those issues concern other team members.

Some folks might not want to write stuff down. In some cases, people could record 15/5s in a video or audio. This can work especially well in environments where people do most of their work away from desks.

And of course there might be things that people want to talk about that they don’t want to write down or record in any way. That’s fine – never insist that feedback or concerns are recorded because you risk not hearing about them at all. 

Alongside the standard questions, you can include optional questions to add context, such as

• What are you working on next? What’s your next priority?
• What are you NOT working on? Why?
• Where are you facing any challenges or blockages?
• What’s the most important thing for us to talk about in our next 1-1?
• Are you working on anything that wasn’t planned? How is that affecting your workload?
• What have you learned or discovered this week?
• What would you change about the work environment, the team, or the organisation?
• What small thing would improve your day?
• What are you grateful for?

15/5 Reports and Psychological Safety

I’d argue that 1-1 meetings (as we’ve discussed in previous issues) are the primary protocol for effective communication in teams, but 15/5s can be fantastic way to feed into 1-1s and make them even more effective. In my experience, 15/5s are one of the most practical, and easy-to-implement practices that a manager can adopt with their teams, fostering psychological safety whilst improving performance.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences of using 15/5s, or variations thereof, with your teams.

More Psychological Safety Workshops!

We have a few places left on our upcoming workshops – you can choose from:

• Intermediate: essential theory and practice to help you level up your knowledge and skills.
• In-depth: examining elements such as cultural impacts on psychological safety, complexity, sociotechnicality, organisational scale and more.
• Practices: From Empathy Mapping to TRIZ. You learn practices and take away canvases and templates too.
• Leadership: Specifically for managers and senior leaders (or folks on that journey): we cover effective management practices, strategic leadership, reporting, 1-1s, work design and flow, managing neurodiverse people and more. [More sessions coming in the new year]

 Find out more and register here.

Even more exciting is the news that psychsafety.com courses all now come with Credly Badges! After completion of the course, you’ll receive an email to claim your badge, which you can use to evidence your CPD and share on your LinkedIn profile.

If you’ve previously attended any psychsafety.com workshops, you’ll soon receive an email to retrospectively claim your badges as well!

Psychological Safety at Work

I’m a huge Audre Lorde fan. In 2016, poet, editor and assistant professor Divya Victor created this Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself, for students of her Creative Writing courses at Nanyang Technological University. Adapted from Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action“, Divya distilled Lorde’s insights into this powerful set of questions – note in particular question 4: 

1. What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]
2. What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]
3. “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”  [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after.]
4. If we have been “socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition”, ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?”* [So, answer this today. And every day.]

In this LinkedIn post, community member and friend Roberto Ferraro shared an illustration reminding introverts to speak, and extroverts to think. What I especially like about the post is Roberto’s crucial point of “Introverted individuals make up about half of the world’s population. However, 96% of senior executives prefer to define themselves as extroverts because of prejudice.” It’s worth noting that the idea that some people are extroverts and others are introverts, is somewhat a false binary. Evidence strongly suggests that there is a spectrum, or curve, of extroversion at one end, and introversion at the other, upon which we all sit – but in different places in different contexts. We may be introverted at work, but extroverted with friends, for example. Ultimately, Roberto’s illustration is useful, and helps to remind us to reflect and consider our approach in group contexts. Equally as important, for me, is Roberto’s normalisation of introversion as a positive leadership trait. 

Thanks to Chris Baynham-Hughes for sharing this – on the Radio 4 Today show this week, Melissa Mead and Rob Behrens were discussing sepsis, and how whilst improvements have been made, culture in the UK NHS means that patients are not always listened to when they have concerns about sepsis. People who don’t speak English as a first language or are members of oppressed and under-served communities may also not feel able to speak up with their concerns. There are steps to introduce new complaints frameworks, which aim to encourage learning in the healthcare system, and personally, I’m hopeful that the implementation of PSIRF will also contribute to a more progressive culture. However, whilst budgets are inadequate, resources are scarce, and frontline healthcare workers are under incredible strain, it’s going to be difficult. Skip to 2:46:40 to find the relevant part.

I sometimes get pushback on the concept of psychological safety. Sometimes people will say that we don’t need it, want it, or that people should just speak up even without psychological safety. My observation is that it tends to be men who are most vocal on this point. Of course, this may just be chance, it may be my own echo chamber, or it may be that men are more inclined to disagree in public. When I saw “the man box” though, a concept coined by Tony Porter and shared by Elliot Rae on Linkedin, I wondered whether some of the resistance to the idea of psychological safety comes from this concept of masculinity – the notion that men must be seen to be brave and suffer in silence? Food for thought maybe.

An estimated 50,000 pregnant women are caught up in the conflict in Gaza, with around 5,500 due to give birth within the next 30 days. These women are facing extreme challenges in accessing safe maternity services, as hospitals are overwhelmed with patients and running out of medicines and basic supplies. Psychsafety.com is donating to the UNFPA crisis fund for Gaza, and if you wish to, and are able to, you can do so here.

This week’s poem:

“Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.”

Charles Eisenstein, from The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible