How can you assess the effectiveness of SEL in your team?

I have been a manager and an Individual contributor. From my experience: 1. Start with assessing organisational needs/values. Individual goals should be in harmony with the larger vision of the company. 2. Involving the team in goal setting from Day 1 is very important. 3. I suggest the use of OKR's in goal settings because they are measurable. 4. Communicating goals clearly to the team, conducting sessions are so important. 5. From a team member perspective, it is very important to do self assessment. Reflecting on strength and weakness is the key. 6. Lastly, Feedback mechanism is such a powerful tool. Share insights on what you believe would be the most impactful areas of improvement.

In my experience it’s important to first look at the organizations MVGs, (Mission, Values and Goals). What do they SAY is important when compared to what’s actually important, so the very next step is to look at what we say is the strategy. Next, I look at the last ‘write-ups’ or Recognition. What an organization actually values is what is high-lighted. This is actual Culture. When leadership, and individual contributors act in unison with these two factors, the result is high-functioning teams. In many companies, we are told that employee contributions are what’s important, if, however the strategy and the culture don’t match you have dis-function. When in doubt, ask a question. Ask your team what’s important at the office and beyond.

In my experience, there is no better framework other than setting OKR's (objective and key results) to set and assess the goals. It provides a great framework to understand what we want to achieve, where we are currently and how do we want to go forward. All other techniques/formal tools mentioned here will fall in. We should leave it to teams and individuals how they want to measure. So setting up OKR's (be it at any level - Product, Team, Personal) should be given utmost priority and then how do we keep revisiting them is something which is very important, otherwise it will become stale just like any other document.

In my organisation, we used few tools. Started with excel/powerpoint templates for OKR settings and then moved to Viva goals (now part of MS Teams) which is more structured from data organisation, visualisation and interpretation. Goal settings can be done at individual, group, team, product and organisation level. It then helped compare common goals from multiple teams in the larger context.

From my experience, organisations should not spend or I would rather say, waste time in preparing reports/presentations with lots of meeting. Platform that you are choosing for goal settings in our case it was Viva goals, is a comprehensive platform and teams can typically do everything there itself. Also, I prefer growth mindset approach over any other technique say, STAR (it's good for interviews) because it doesn't take teams/members into analysis/paralysis process.

Yes it's not one time process. What worked best for me/and for my teams, is checkin every quarter. It gives sufficient time to look back and retrospect what went well and what needs improvement.