Also known as a maturity model, a team health check is an Agile tool for evaluating and tracking team satisfaction and happiness over time.
Published on October 4, 2022 Updated on April 11, 2024Managers and leads must pay close attention to team health and happiness over time when leading Agile tech teams. Otherwise, employee morale and satisfaction will plummet, leading to lower product quality and decreased customer satisfaction.
Team health checks are one of the best ways to measure and track team health and happiness. Read on to learn more about them and why you should conduct them. We've also provided a team health checklist template of questions.
Also known as a maturity model, a team health check is an Agile tool for evaluating and tracking team satisfaction and happiness over time. Managers regularly use team health checks to drive continuous improvement.
Like most Agile tools and processes, team health checks are self-directed — team members can use simple emoticon responses to talk about their feelings honestly. Managers and team leads can use these visual results to facilitate discussions, create growth strategies, and address blockages. They can also track changes over time to spot new areas for improvement.
Team health checks can make or break your team and your bottom line. If you don't perform regular team health checks, your team may become dissatisfied, unmotivated, and inefficient. They may also lose trust in one another, leading to disagreements and other barriers to success.
Other reasons for conducting regular team health checks include:
There are many ways to run team health checks. Depending on your budget, preferences, and needs, you can use Niko-Niko calendars, the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, Atlassian's Team Health Monitor, Spotify Squad Health Check, TeamMood, or Comparative Agility to run health checks.
A Niko-Niko calendar is a calendar for tracking team moods.
It has columns with work days and rows with team members' names. At the end of each day, everyone meets in front of the calendar and uses emojis or color stickers to indicate their feelings.
Niko-Niko calendars can be offline or digital. Digital Niko-Niko calendars often provide dashboards and analytics for understanding the relationship between team mood and productivity.
The Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey is a survey platform for evaluating employee engagement. Every item on the Gallup Q12 has been thoroughly tested and validated as an accurate measure of employee engagement.
This tool consists of 12 core questions. They ask whether an employee:
The survey also contains 150 validated and tested questions that supplement the 12 core questions. You can access them by getting an ongoing subscription to Gallup Access. The 150 supplemental questions cover various topics, including employee experience, leadership, inclusion, culture, and remote work.
Follow these steps to use the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey:
Atlassian's Team Health Monitor is a browser tool for assessing the health of three types of teams:
To use the Atlassian Team Health Monitor, simply send team members a link to the test. After picking a team type, employees will be asked to rate eight attributes, including balanced team, team cohesiveness, and shared understanding. They can use the following icons to indicate ratings:
Another great way to check your team's health is the Spotify Squad Health Check. It involves 11 areas of inquiry and three color ratings.
The Spotify Squad Health Check is best suited for collecting data from multiple teams from one company or department. Here's an example of a health check output:
As in Atlassian Team Health Monitor, green is good, yellow indicates some problems, and red indicates many problems. The arrows denote whether a trend is improving or getting worse.
As you can see, each team evaluates its situation differently. Squad 4 seems to be doing exceptionally well, while Squad 2 seems to be struggling quite a bit. Besides comparing teams, you can also scan the overall picture to see whether teams are improving as a whole.
Here's how to conduct a Spotify Squad Health Check:
TeamMood is a user-friendly team health check software. It uses Slack, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and email prompts to get daily moods from employees in under two minutes. You can then track your team's feelings and resolve problems before they become crises.
Other features include:
Comparative Agility is the world's largest continuous improvement and agility assessment platform. It provides a clear picture of how your people are performing and what you can do to improve wellness.
Here's how Comparative Agility works:
Comparative Agility boasts multiple state-of-the-art features for Agile teams, including:
Agile leads and managers use various indicators to pinpoint the current health of the team. Here's a sample checklist of team health check indicators. Feel free to use these samples or create your own.
We can define and measure our impact on the business and users.
Our processes are effective and aligned. We have reliable metrics for measuring our goals.
We use our time wisely every day, week, and month.
We understand our unique value proposition. We have defined success and identified relevant key performance indicators and metrics.
Our skill set is appropriate for the project. There are clear responsibilities and duties for each team member.
Decisions are made by the right people with the appropriate degree of urgency. Decisions are communicated effectively beforehand.
Team members communicate clearly to share knowledge, insights, and learning to lessen complexity, risk, effort, resources, and other barriers.
We have ample opportunities for refining and expanding our skill set. We learn and implement lessons during every iteration.
We get to manage our own workload and workflow. We can voice opinions and suggestions without being criticized.
Every team member exhibits clear ownership and is accountable for their actions. The team has a dedicated product owner who is accountable for the team's results and encourages the team to create innovative solutions to problems.
Everyone supports the project, understands their duties, and believes they can add value.
We love our work and working in an Agile team. Our work pushes us to improve and learn new skills.
Leading strong Agile tech teams can be a challenge. Besides holding meetings and coaching team members, leaders and managers must conduct regular team health checks to evaluate team members' well-being and mood. Without a clear understanding of team members' feelings, leaders will find it difficult to move forward. Teams will also face communication and collaboration challenges, leading to mediocre products, lower customer satisfaction, and lower revenues.
