Co-pilot with Bethany Planton - Measuring What Matters: Team Happiness, Stress, and Well-Being

In this episode of Agile Driven Impact, we explore the vital connection between team well-being and performance. Joining us is Bethany M. Planton, Founder and CEO of bmpconsulting, a certified Grant Professional, and a Registered Scrum Master and Product Owner.

Bethany shares her unique perspective on why team happiness is a leading indicator of success rather than a "soft metric." We dive into the relationship between team happiness and stress, discussing how leaders can move beyond traditional surveys to use well-being data as a serious performance management strategy. Bethany also offers practical, lightweight approaches to measure team health, foster psychological safety, and turn data into meaningful action to prevent burnout and improve team dynamics in mission-driven environments.

GPA Publications: 

Burnout in the Grants Profession: An Initial Analysis

BIGGER than Burnout: Strategies for Winning the Silent Battle

Healthy Grant Professionals in the Real World

BMP Consulting

Evolving your work, accelerating your impact

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Hey, welcome to Agile Driven Impact. And today's episode, we are so excited for this co-pilot episode where we've got Bethany Planton of BMP Consulting talking with us about team happiness and stress.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Yeah, I really I really enjoyed the conversation because we really got into using those as real metrics that can um change the way that organizational leaders think about how to measure performance and what causes good performance. I think that was really eye-opening and how to connect those metrics to success in the future. I think it was really enjoyable. I think you'll get a lot out of it, and I think it was a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

It was a lot of fun and so much fun that you're gonna want to stick around at the end of the episode for the ice cream outtakes. Yep, that's the end. Hello and welcome back to Agile Driven Impact. We are so excited to have a very special guest, not just joining us on Zoom, but joining us live in person for this particular uh recording of our co-pilot episode. And this one is super special to us. Uh our guest today, Bethany M. Planton, GPC RSM, RPO, is a really good friend of ours, right? Just to be super transparent. Uh, and in addition to being a really good friend, she's the founder and CEO of BMP Consulting, a capacity-building firm serving 501c3 nonprofit organizations for a decade, more than a decade, millions of dollars raised, lots of support for nonprofits of all shapes and sizes with a particular passion for like human services and art. Yeah, lots of stuff. We're gonna get into some of it. Um, but yes, all the scrummy things too. And the reason why, and then we're gonna talk about, I want you to talk about your background and all that here in a second, but Bethany's part of a group that uh yeah, they go by hashtag healthy grant pro, done a bunch of research, published around burnout, and tested agile and scrum techniques in thinking about helping teams. So, Bethany, welcome. Thank you. It's fun to be here. And I think we should say like happy ice cream month. Yes, that's an important that is very important. It's probably gonna come up in today's conversation, right? Probably. Yeah. Okay. So there you go. I gave a big intro, but I mean, Eric, want to find out some more about our awesome guests? Yeah. Understand the context?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Yeah, I think the combination of credentials that you have is pretty rare, right? So uh grant professional certification and a scrum master and product owner uh credentials. Like, how did your path lead you to bring agile practices into grant work and nonprofit consulting? Like, where does that path start?

SPEAKER_03 2:47

Well, it starts with you. We're being honest. It's because I was subcontracting with Diane and learned learned these things and then realized as learning them and working with the team on them that oh, this this really could help with burnout and really could do some things to help make sure we're not stressed and we're not um overwhelmed by all of the things that we have to do in grant writing.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Okay, so you connected it to so so just help help help the listeners out. So you connected it really to something that you were already passionate about, which was sustainable pace of work and keeping people from burning out on what's typically pretty difficult things.

SPEAKER_03 3:28

Right. So scrum, the scrum certifications came first and then the healthy grant pro, but it was it filled with I think it's personality somewhat of just I was from the beginning, I've always been the don't email me while I'm off. Like leave me alone, I'm not working, so I will not see it. So these so I think the scrum principles just worked with that very cohesively and made it easy to just go, oh yeah, why wouldn't we do this?

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Cool, cool.

SPEAKER_02 3:58

And I mean, I don't have my bookshelf behind me. We're in Eric's workspace, but when I've got my books behind me, I'm always pointing at the GPA journals. The Healthy Grant Different Office. But the Healthy Grant Pro Group, and let's give a quick shout-out, right? And Jana Rogers and uh Trish Bachman and Patricia Du Bois were the other three individuals who've done all this research with you. You've been published two times, three times so far. So, but that says what? I mean, that the fact that it's been published that much, it's been studied. This isn't nice to have.

SPEAKER_03 4:31

Oh, oh, okay. No, no, because the first article was we just wanted to establish that there we needed data to show there was burnout within the profession. Lots of other professions had shown it already, but we're grant professionals. We know we need our data. Like, where was the data? We had all the anecdotal evidence, people coming up to us saying burnout, staying up all night doing stuff. We know this is not sustainable. So that's what we set out to do was we just want some data. So we created the first article, talks about talks about the data we collected, which was a survey through the Grant Professionals Association and some other entities. And that said three out of four people has experienced burnout. Now, of course, we're not saying, did you experience burnout? Because people don't know. But all the symptoms, are you doing these? And that's how we did it. But then that opened the bigger, like we're like, oh, that would be nice if we just do that. No, there's more. Because we open we kind of open the door then because people are like, Well, we have it, so what do we do? And so that was the second and third articles are about the the second one is lots of strategies. Take or pick, we divided them into I care because we don't love self-care word that's been used in different ways, but I care, we care, and they care. So I care is myself, we care is us as a profession, and then they care is the organizations you work with. So we had strategies for all that. Then that we kept going, okay, but this they care piece, this organizational, which is I feel like really our scrum comes in too. How do we make our organizations better so that we're not burning out? We can do all, you know, we can do all the self-care, I care we want, but that if you're in a bad situation, one that's gonna burn you out, then you know what we do. So we're trying to see, we didn't get fully full through that, but what we did, we were trying to find out is if those that you report to, like grant professional proof reporting to someone, do they understand what we need? And we kind of found there wasn't as much difference in that. So we think it's maybe a bigger cultural thing than just your straight boss, but probably the whole organization if there's their stuff. But plenty of room. We're happy to have other people start doing some research to take our ideas and keep going.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

I mean, a lot of scientific research, um, along with some patterns from Scrum uh point out that it's not that success leads to happiness, it's actually the other way around. Happiness drives performance, whether it be in the nonprofit space, the business space, or any of those types of things. So, like, what does that actually look like to you in practice? And how has that insight from that research shaped how you actually work with real teams?

SPEAKER_03 7:17

First ground, we've seen a lot of times that we know that happiness precedes success. And why wouldn't you want a bunch of happy team members? Like, why would you want them miserable? So I think that's the path I go of like, okay, so what do we do to that makes them happy? Like I recently did a training where we were talking about coaching um those that report to the like middle management. And I found a list there's of 16 reasons people leave jobs. Only like three or four of them, I don't remember the exact number, but three or four of them dealt with actual money. So working, I mean, we Diana and I working a lot in the nonprofit, they don't always have the money to always raise the salary, but you can do a lot of things that help people be happy at work without it always being money. Um giving them clear instructions of what they should be doing, um, appraising them, you know, celebrating the little wins, those sorts of things that can actually make it a better work environment and then lead to which then people are happier after.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

So then if if you're so you you're actually measuring some form of you're putting a metric on um when that metric changes, what do you practically do with it? So if the metric, let's say the team is getting a bunch happier, what do you do with that insight? Or they're getting less happy. What do you do with that insight?

SPEAKER_03 8:43

We look at the data and see what was happening.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:46

Do we want to tell the famous now famous story?

SPEAKER_02 8:49

There is a very famous story of infamous, yeah. No, that's true. Uh, of Bethany being a scrum master as a subcontractor to my writing team at the time. And well, I'm not gonna steal your story. I mean it's our story, but yeah, yeah, no, you get to start it.

SPEAKER_03 9:04

Go ahead. So, we a couple years in a row, we kept seeing a dip in happy the team happiness. We've been tracking it for every sprint for years, and we kept seeing a dip at the same time. Finally, we're gonna go, oh yeah, this is the same time as last year we saw a dip. Why in the world are we seeing a dip? It's in the summer. We all like summer, we're all usually pretty happy in the summer. For the most part, our deadline wasn't like changing a ton. It was all the we're so it took a little bit to up digging, and then we went, Oh, the New York State grants come out and are due in the summer. And we started digging deeper because it wasn't just New York, it wasn't just the fact that it was New York State grants. That was not actually that'd be a sip a subject high podcast episode. That's not today's yeah, yeah. Nope. That wasn't it though. Nope, it wasn't. We finally found out by talking to the team. I think it did take some conversations with the team figuring out very usually does. Yeah. Oh, it's because we're taking on new clients that have not worked with us at all. New York State grants are very, they need to have their program design very well done to be able to be successful, and we're getting them too early too late to have that stuff done, done it well, and us work with them and be able to guide them into what they need to do to have these New York State. So we weren't having high success with the New York State grants in those instances. And we weren't, and it was stressful for everybody. They didn't have all this stuff, they didn't have all their grant readiness stuff done usually. And so that's what we ended up deciding was dipping the happiness.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

Yeah, and then I'll catch the story if I can, because by having someone who was paying attention to the data, Bethany was looking at the trends and said, Here's what we and did some more digging, surveyed the team to try and get some more information. Why do we think? What are your theories about why? Came to me then as the chief product owner for the organization, said, Here's what we've found. Like, wow, can't even imagine. And also to add one layer, they weren't our traditional types of clients either. That's part of why they were coming in because this New York State process, everybody can apply. Anybody, you want money, everybody can apply. So it was all sorts of people that, to your point, weren't ready.

SPEAKER_04 11:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

And so the team said, What if we didn't take those clients the next time? So they're proposing something that's like might feel pretty risky in terms of like right happiness questions and all these take a lot of psychological safety. They came to me and said, What if we didn't do it this way? What if we changed the way we take clients for this project? What if we said we only take new clients until it opens? What if we I'm like, that's a pretty cool working theory after multiple years of data and like it's in your face. Sure, right. Let's try it for one year because that's all you can do, right? You've got to do some hypothetical test to see if it really gonna moot change the numbers. And Bethany, did we see a dip? Nope. Nope, nope, and we still years later have exactly the same structure in place for that because we don't want to risk that that would be a dip. It's summer, people want ice cream, right?

SPEAKER_03 11:57

Right, yes, I do want ice cream and time on the river.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Absolutely. Yeah, I love the connection of the the metric to then kind of root causing it, and I think that's a powerful thing. Um, you know, and I think I I want to ask this next question, which is really around it's because I work in the for-profit space, and it's oftentimes difficult to get leaders to think that happiness is a real metric, right? Right, yeah, and that it leads to performance. And I think uh this story and the stories that that I use sometimes too with with my group sometimes help with that because if if there's a policy change or something else, you can see it in the data, and then you can get the team members to maybe propose instead of just complaining, right? Because the complaining is in the the metric, right? They can complain with the metric. Okay, now that we've got the complaining out of out of the way with the metric, great. What are some things we could do? Right, and turning it from a complaint into action and ideas from just any employee, right? Any team member. I think that's a powerful thing.

SPEAKER_02 13:04

Yeah. Well, and so I wanna, it's not just about our story, but in any of the teams that are measuring happiness, that's a pretty risky question to ask. More people think you're joking, right? Right. I asked in a conference space once, there's 300 people in the room, and I'm like, how many of you want to be happy at work? And the room was silent, minus a few chuckles. And they're like, Yeah, right. Of course we want to be happy at work. And I'm like, okay, but I'm serious, but how many of you were asked recently if you were happy at work in the last month? No hands. In the last quarter, I got a few. In the last six months, a few more. In the last year. Yeah. That's time you're done, you've got like maybe 10% of the room's hands are open, right? Or up. And right, so not a lot of people are asking or they don't feel comfortable asking.

SPEAKER_03 13:50

And I feel like they're not asking in a non-meaningful way. Like they might say, Are you happy?

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Are you happy? Are you happy? Yes, no question, right?

SPEAKER_03 13:56

Yeah, like, oh god, yeah, I'm gonna say no to that, right? Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

And that probably, I mean, that leads us to the next question that I'd like to ask, which is probably around how do you actually get uh meaningful information versus a survey that people just fill out and forget? Like what tools, approaches have you um seen work, or what have you seen that just gets ignored?

SPEAKER_03 14:20

I don't think any tool can be ignored. So it's the tool that you'll use. I say that for measuring happiness all the way down to what email service you're gonna use, right? Like, what's the tool that you and your group will use? So is it as simple as we need one survey and there's you know one person that that's their job to go look at it, and everybody knows to fill it out at the certain time, and but what's the tool that you and your group will use? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

So just something simple that people actually use that they feel comfortable and safe putting information in. Yeah, yes, that psychological safety, making sure that have you seen that it's normally that you need to make it anonymous to get started and to kind of roll the whole group's information together versus individuals. What have you seen?

SPEAKER_03 15:09

I think that let me give the standard current professional answer. It depends. I think if your team is already a pretty good set team, you probably might already have that psychological safety, it doesn't matter as much. But if you're really starting new, yeah, probably the anonymous will just look at it all together. Right. Everybody's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

Yeah.

unknown 15:30

Cool.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

And I know a little shout out to our season two sponsor, Agiline Nonprofits. In their retrospective toolkit download, there's like fun ways to do it where people like in order to put their name there, like they put a dot on the pizza. They put a sprinkle on the ice cream. I know we brought it back ice cream again. There's a theme. There's a theme. Uh, but so that it's anonymous doesn't have to be like a Google form anonymous, right? It can be like something a little more fun and lighthearted, too. Again, thanks to our sponsor for that free download for everybody, because that's not nonprofit specific. Those templates work anywhere. In fact, a lot of them were inspired by Chris Stone, who works with a lot of for-profits in the UK and around the world, right? Um, so yeah, I think that's a really important question that you raised. Anything, Eric, that you want to chime in on too, though, because you're in a different industry space than we are a lot of the time. For like, what is a go-to tool that if you have to start, what might you propose for somebody like that?

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Yeah, I mean if you're in like a scaled environment with multiple teams in a larger organization, typically what I've seen is at the team level, you might be looking at the psychological safety, so everyone might fill it out even openly in the team, but then taking that team's average, totally anonymized, and then that given up is usually the way that people feel safe enough about it. And that's given some really good insights. Um, you know, at a at one of the uh organizations I work with, there was a dip in happiness that preceded two people from the team leaving the company. Now, it would have been beneficial for to be looking at it a little ahead of time, yeah, but in hindsight, it was like, wow, the data did show this. Uh so it's important that if you are rolling it up that somebody's doing something, not about the absolute numbers, but the change, right? Yeah, because one team's three and another team's four on a scale of one to five is kind of meaningless. Um, but if one team goes from a four to a three, or one team goes from a three to a four, right? That's meaningful information. That's at least what what we've found. Well, I think there's an interesting one that for you because you guys you you all measure something a little different. You measure two metrics, right? And I and I want to hear more about that because to me that's something that we don't do yet, and I think is really cool. And you do it partially because your grant writing firm is don't let grants stress you out, is like the the motto, but you use another metric along with happiness. How does how does that work?

SPEAKER_02 17:53

Well, and Bethany and I have talked about this a lot, and then so I would say actually her role as a scrum master in our team is part of what is embedded in that, even though she's not working with our team and is just now a year pregnant.

SPEAKER_04 18:07

Maybe she embedded it.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

But I would say I would her I would credit her boundary setting with part of what inspired actually our current scrum master. So a previous podcast guest, Beth Archer, was the one who said, you know, there's what happiness is on the day of, but then there's all the things that are happening in the sprint that influence that answer. But we don't want to ask everybody about happiness on a daily basis. That feels like it's just gonna lose all meaning. Right. And so, and she has a happiness budget. Again, credit to Bethany for how we collaboratively we're like, what if we just put a few dollars? Not a few dollars. It was a few dollars, yeah. Literally, and so all this had been done, but still it's not about happiness. Beth said, I wonder if we talked about team stress on a daily basis, what would that lead to? How would we understand that maybe everybody had a great day because you just did a whole bunch of project submissions right before retrospective? Yeah, happiness is gonna be super high, right? Teams flying, everybody's loving it, versus whew, that was just a like a really hard thing that happened the day of retrospective and it it influences it. So we started to ask every day at Daily Scrum, what is your current stress level? But the team didn't love the one to five scale, which is often how they're thinking about happiness. They instead found colors that they liked. And so blue means super calm.

SPEAKER_03 19:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:31

And green is energized, ready to go. Yellow is a little stressed. I think we're gonna be okay. Yeah. Red, I need help. Like somebody helped propose solutions, let's swarm something's gotta give. Then there's brown. And brown means send coffee or chocolate. So it's like all the way on red. It's beyond red, which is I know, right? You might think it comes before, but no, and it's almost more like I don't know what color to give. And so like then it's like send chocolate, send coffee. Right. Or actually, because we got a lot of tea drinkers on the team, it could be send tea. Tea. Anything, but like send caffeine. And so they started to ask that every day and also document it in the same spreadsheet in a different tab. So one's always tracking the happiness, one's tracking their daily answers, so that they could plot where are their correlations between them, what's happening during a week, what's happening immediately before. What we found is that the happiness is still really linked to what happened for stress level the day before retrospective. Okay. But you could see some, and we're about two years into it now. We can see trends that are not related to happiness, but to stress and to deadlines and volume that have brought about deeper conversations than in measuring happiness, what we had found in 10 years. So both they show us different things, but well, to Bethany's point, like only if you're watching the data. Right, right. Right. I don't know how long it took you when you went through that spreadsheet years ago to uncover. Yeah. But it I there was way before AI was doing it.

SPEAKER_03 21:06

No, we were definitely doing it ourselves, and it definitely was like, oh, did it wait, did we have this? Feels like we saw this last year. Like that kind of was the just the feeling. Let's go back. But I love that you're doing the stress now because measuring the stress, because that's burnout is all based on stress. People kind of think burnout sometimes. You're like, it's a switch flipped. No, there are years usually leading up to being completely burnout, where you're gonna go up and quit, you know, with that no plan. Right. The ultimate burnout story, kind of but measuring that stress, because it's all based on stress. Burnout is yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

Well, and the team it opened up a really interesting conversation about what's the appropriate level of stress. Probably calm, all blues is like too chill. We're like hanging out, right? Right. So like what's the you stress? What's the green level that's appropriate? And if I could then even say one more thing about the story, is that the team decided to start asking clients at their weekly check-ins what their stress levels were using the color code. And all of a sudden, again, to your point, like our team motto that everybody knows us by is don't write brands stress you out. Clients all of a sudden are like, Oh, can I answer teal? I'm kind of between green and yellow. And we started tracking theirs. And in 2026, the team actually set product goals that were related to reducing client stress because that's our tagline. Right, right. You what's your line always about what you measure and importance? You got a great line that I hear you say all the time.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

No, I know, but you say better gets managed, basically. It's what it's what gets measured gets managed.

SPEAKER_03 22:46

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

Good or bad.

SPEAKER_03 22:47

Right, right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

So I think that's why measuring things like happiness and stress is good because you put a metric on it, it can at least fight against the other metrics that are much maybe easier to measure or more meaningful to measure, at least for leadership and management and things like that.

SPEAKER_02 23:02

Yeah. Yeah. So well, what do you have? I mean, I just brought up AI like as a joke. Like Bethany did a whole bunch of manual data analysis to track it. Have you seen any teams starting to use AI in terms of doing data analysis on their happiness or their stress to help flag things for them? Have you seen any of that yet?

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Or is that just a in the sky idea? I think it would be something interesting, though. I think it would be interesting actually to run that data that that you experienced through AI and say, do you see any cyclical trending here or anything that we should pay attention to? And see what does it say? Is it pick up on these types of patterns? It should. I mean, pattern recognition is a key thing. So certainly could make a lot of sense to have an AI running on the happiness and sustainability of your team.

SPEAKER_02 23:46

Yeah, because I think a lot of teams struggle with this concept because they don't necessarily have a person who's got the time to like the expertise, yeah. Also that to like sit down, do the bigger analysis. They they collect, we do, we watch a trend from one week to the next, but like the big meta view I think is pretty important.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

Yeah, with organizations you work with, do you find that is there anyone whose sort of role it is to pay attention to this? I mean scrum, we'd call it a scrum master or something like this. Is do you find that organizations lack a person that's looking at sustainability and things like that? Yes.

SPEAKER_03 24:21

There's not much to, yes, for sure. I feel like especially in nonprofits, we're all stretched thin, we're all wearing all the hats, as we say, and that falls through the cracks.

SPEAKER_04 24:32

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

Well, and I think that my undergrad minor was in human resources. So now maybe it's a human resource team, it's the people's team, right? Right. But it feels like it could sit there. It could sit in the project management space, right? It doesn't have to be only folks that are worried about agile in a project management at the project done way. But you're right, I think it's absent in a lot of organizations of various shapes and sizes. Um so when we think about creating a culturally safe space, knowing it could originate in a few other places, what do you do to help suggest psychological safety steps, moving towards a spot regardless of who's gonna open the conversation? Any suggestions?

SPEAKER_03 25:16

It's gonna take time. Okay, like going slow, knowing that it's gonna go slow, listening to your team and then acting on what they're saying. It's not everything, but telling them, I hear you and we're gonna I have to either take that, you know, I might have to take that up higher, whatever the suggestion is, or not just a no and you know, quit listening, but uh what can we almost like improv, yes and what can we do that helps and that then over the weeks and the months that helps build the the safety to to be able to do more stuff then right because to your point people that are doing the asking aren't the ones that necessarily have the power to influence the change, right?

SPEAKER_02 25:59

Right, you and the team had to come to me and ask. Yeah, Eric and scaled situations that you're in every day, but the teams don't always have the power, they're not empowered to make a change that's gonna influence their numbers, is that true? Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think one of the things that uh you need to do is get leadership uh at the higher level in the organization to believe this data is helpful to them. I don't know if you've seen how how do you help uh organizations that are let's say the management or leadership of an organization feel that uh this happiness and stress data and things like this will help them.

SPEAKER_03 26:31

Mm-hmm. For some, it's uh hey to try it. You know, like it's not gonna cost you anything to to to start uh tracking this data, gathering this data and tracking it. Like it's not just try it and see if it changes. Some it might be here's all the research that says happiness it you know precedes success. And do you want to be a successful organization? Yeah, then maybe you want your people to be happy. Yeah. So I I think it's you kind of have to read the people to like do they want the data, do they want the stories? You know, do the here's my, you know, here's some organizations that have changed and look what all they've gotten done, or just test it and try it and see, see if that changes anything.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

That makes me think too of another scenario where it might be, you know, as you try to sell this to leadership in your organization, think about an organizational change that was made in the last six to 12 months and maybe even ask leadership. Wouldn't it have been nice to have this data when you create that change? Yeah, you could see if that organizational change is something people really liked or something that was challenged, and having that data would have said, hmm, happiness went down. Why? Right. Right. So knowing that, you know, you'd have a policy change in your organization that might be controversial. Right.

unknown 27:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 27:47

Actually, you know, you say that, and I'm like, yep, I'm nodding. And I've not tried that approach to look back and say, wouldn't it have been nice if you had it? But if you know that, especially if it's someone who likes to make empirical decisions, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

I'm gonna put that one in my own box.

SPEAKER_01 28:03

How do you you know how do you steer without seeing the dashboard and the windshield and what's going on, right? So, hey, we made this change in the organization. What was the baseline information before we made this change? Yeah, because a lot of times we'll make a change and then we'll ask after the change, you know, how did the change go? But if you had the baseline before it and the baseline after it, you don't have to ask how did the change go? You can actually see it in real data as it moves.

SPEAKER_02 28:25

So very nice job on the dashboard analogy.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Anyway, and I think back to cars and ice cream, you know, this is this is title driven by ice cream. You know, Hot Flood Sun didn't do that.

SPEAKER_02 28:37

So it could be.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

So it could be maybe kind of as a closure closure. Oftentimes we like to make these into actionable steps. So if a team leader, a scrum master, a grant professional, anyone like that listening today has never formally measured their team's happiness, stress levels, what's like the simplest, lowest barrier step that they could make tomorrow, this week? What could they do?

SPEAKER_03 29:03

I think they figure out a time frame you want to measure your happiness a week. You know, we talk about in Scrum, we talk about a sprint. So if you have a sprint, use that. If you're not using sprints, then you know, a week and just start making it part of the process, whether it's uh a Google form. I think we started maybe in did we start in a spreadsheet, something along those lines and one through five and have them do it at the same approximately the same time every week for and start looking at the data that way. And I like the stress every day just to see. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Good advice.

SPEAKER_03 29:36

Just get started.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

Yeah, pick something. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. As you're thinking about it, listeners, and we always issue a challenge of some kind. So what we want to hear back from you is what is the cadence? Is it at your bi-weekly team meeting? Is it at your, you know, every Friday staff get together? But like, where is it and what do you try? Yeah. So like that, it's always at the same time people learn to be predictable about it, and like we're super excited to hear from you. What is the thing that you try? Yeah, I think that's going to be fantastic. And so as we think about closing out today's episode, and Bethany, it was so fun to have you like live with us for actual recording.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Thanks for traveling.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

True story, she does not live near us.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

So main flight, yeah, just to record with us. All that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Happiness after fit clan canceled flights lower than happiness now. But I'm here now, so it's happy. Very happy. We'll be happier once we find post-podcast ice cream, of course. Um, and so I want to give uh a big thank you, Bethany, for being with us and talking about this. Uh, the folks that are listening might want to read some more about the research. And I'm pretty certain that all those journals can be found open to the public at Grant Professionals Association, correct?

SPEAKER_03 30:54

That is correct. All right. And they're uh also on I'm not gonna remember Escope. Is it what's the do you all remember the one of those like journal sites?

SPEAKER_02 31:03

Yeah, one of those. So we'll put them in the show notes. Yeah, and uh, but grantprofessionals.org will also help you get there if you click through their journals. Yes. If people want to learn more about your work or about generally healthy grant pro, where should they go? Probably my website's the easiest, so bmpconsulting.org. Awesome. Thanks again. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 31:22

Yeah, this is fun.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

And as always, a huge shout out uh to our season two sponsor, Agile and Nonprofits. I know I talked about them earlier for their retrospective template that they've got. Uh actually a whole bunch of templates that you can download for free. They offer training and support for nonprofits and government, non-government entities and change makers of all shapes and sizes. Check out their trainings and free downloads at www.agilandonprofits.com. Thanks everybody for being with us again for this episode. And what are you gonna say?

SPEAKER_01 31:57

See you at the next one.

SPEAKER_02 31:58

Oh, keep driving the impact. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:01

Keep driving the impact all the way to get ice cream. The ice cream distracted me.

SPEAKER_02 32:05

We're on our way. We're not talking about our favorite flavors. No, we'll talk about that in a few minutes. All right, good, good. Thanks again for being with us. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 32:18

Sure. So are we going to Gales for ice cream after this? Are we going to the scoop? Like there's so many choices in the Thousand Islands. Which one is closest, I think?

SPEAKER_03 32:28

Let's go now. Well, I thought you were gonna say, like, which brand. Oh, that's that also is important. Anybody local brand, like makes their makes their own ice cream.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

They're all just bigger, well, Perry's is kind of Perry's is kind of Hershey's it yeah, yeah. Um, okay, flavors. What are we doing? I'm getting mine in a dish. I know that I don't remember it.

SPEAKER_03 32:50

I'm gonna cone all the time. Sugar cone. Really cool, yeah. Yeah, it adds a new level cone to eating it. You gotta eat it fast.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Yeah, it's true. It's challenging.

SPEAKER_03 32:58

Uh I like to be able to eat my cup. Environmentally fancy.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

You didn't have to be at the cup plus the cake, no?

SPEAKER_03 33:06

I hate when they have to do that. Usually that's when it's a real soft ice cream, and it's like, no, like gelato doesn't usually I have to get a cup for gelato, usually. But flavor for me is what's something local that isn't everywhere? Like, can I try something that's more here? There's a and I'm not gonna remember the name of the berry. There's a berry that's grown in the northwest. So when I was I've been in Idaho and Washington and they both had that berry and ice cream, and I was like, well, I can't get that in the Midwest and the South. I'm gonna try that. But coffee is my go-to.

SPEAKER_01 33:35

If yeah, when we lived in Michigan, Mackinac Island fudge.

SPEAKER_03 33:38

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Although that's spread out now, and you can get it in more places because it's been more commercialized. But like back then it was like you can only get it there.

SPEAKER_02 33:47

I mean, like Thousand Islands dressing, like that would be right. They all can expensive. Maybe like a maple flavor, right?

SPEAKER_03 33:53

All New York maple syrup, just something kind of unusual that's not everywhere.

SPEAKER_04 33:57

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:58

So um, sweet, have you ever sweet corn ice cream? What I don't particularly like it, but there is places that you can get that. All right.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

Well, I don't think that's gonna lower my happiness and increase my strength.

SPEAKER_02 34:13

I know. I feel like anything today is gonna increase my happiness significantly. Yeah, because here we are recording on what is it? Now ice cream Sunday day.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

So National Ice Cream Sunday day is not on the Sunday, seems like it should be on a Sunday.

SPEAKER_03 34:30

But National Ice Cream Day is on a Sunday.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

It's weird.

SPEAKER_03 34:32

Third Sunday of July, just in case you need to know. Thank you, President Reagan.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

But Sunday day is not on Sunday.

SPEAKER_03 34:38

No, but also July is ice cream.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

I think it's not July.

SPEAKER_02 34:41

Right. There's a whole bunch of reasons to celebrate and why it's amazing that Bethany wore her ice cream earring. Yeah, and her logo is ice cream branded. No way. Wow. And all of her like outreach messaging stuff is so on point with like happiness and we serve a scoop of sustainability.

SPEAKER_03 35:00

I serve a soup. There's only me talking in the royal weed.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

It's more, you know, it's allows you to scale if you're right. I do have a virtual assistant. Yeah, well, there you go.

SPEAKER_02 35:13

Yeah, but yeah, we serve a scoop of sustainability. That's cool. Nice. Well, now we've talked about it.

SPEAKER_01 35:19

I enjoyed this interview.

SPEAKER_02 35:20

Um I I'm gonna enjoy it even more as it continues on our way to the ice cream shop because now I'm hungry. Right, right. Right. Like that's I think how we have to handle it.

SPEAKER_03 35:29

Sounds good to me. All right, off we go. Ice cream it is.