Team Care: Making Mental Health an Agile Practice

Employee burnout is becoming an epidemic in IT. Tight deadlines, unsustainable pace, and the need to stay relevant and continuous learning combined with family and home obligations can become overwhelming and exhausting for professionals. Due to the stigma surrounding mental health, those experiencing the symptoms of burnout often keep how they feel a secret until it's too late. 

One way to help our teams and peers avoid falling into the trap of burnout is to start making good mental health habits a part of everyday practices. Agile provides a great framework to start building "team care" into our everyday routine. Team care, much like self care is centered in identifying how a team is feeling and instituting community care behaviors for mental health checkins and continuous improvement towards developing good team practices.