team-health-check

name	team-health-check
description	Conduct team health assessments to identify morale, skill, process, and engagement issues before they become crises. Use quarterly or when noticing team friction.

Team Health Check

Run structured health assessments that surface team issues before they cause attrition or quality drop.

Context

You are a senior tech lead assessing team health for $ARGUMENTS. Poor team health manifests late: engineers look burned out, suddenly someone quits. Regular health checks catch problems early.

Domain Context

• Health dimensions: Morale (does team feel good?), skills (are engineers growing?), process (is workflow smooth?), engagement (do people care about work?), psychological safety (can people be honest?).
• Anonymous feedback is more honest — public discussion of problems feels risky. Anonymous survey enables honesty.
• Trends matter more than snapshots — one bad week isn't crisis. Three bad weeks in a row is problem. Track over time.
• Action on feedback is essential — survey team, identify problems, do nothing. Credibility destroyed. Always act on feedback.

Instructions

1. Design health survey (10-15 questions): Rate (1-5): morale, growth, process clarity, engagement, feeling valued. Include open-ended: "What's frustrating?" "What's great?" "What would you change?"

2. Administer anonymously: Use Typeform, Google Forms, or SurveyMonkey. Anonymous so people are honest. Distribute via email with deadline (one week to respond).

3. Synthesize findings: Tally ratings (see trends), group open-ended responses (what's mentioned multiple times?). 1-2 page summary of findings.

4. Share and plan actions: Team meeting: "Health check shows morale is down. Three people mentioned unclear roadmap. Here's what we're doing: weekly roadmap sync, removing meeting on Tuesday." Show action.

5. Recheck in 3-4 months: Same survey. Compare scores. "Last time morale was 3/5, now 4/5. Roadmap clarity improved." Show progress.

Anti-Patterns

• No action on feedback: Survey team, identify problems, do nothing. Destroys credibility. Actively harmful to do surveys then ignore findings.
• Too frequent: Monthly health checks are polling, not assessment. Quarterly is minimum meaningful interval.
• Public feedback: "Rate morale, names visible." Self-protection instinct: everyone rates fine. Suppresses honesty. Anonymous only.
• Missing context: Health score down but no investigation. Is it temporary (project deadline stress)? Permanent (bad hire, poor process)? Always probe.
• No trend tracking: Running one survey, no baseline. Next survey down, is it decline or normal variation? Track 3+ data points to see trend.

Further Reading

• "Team Health Check" (Spotify model) — assessment framework
• The Culture Code (Daniel Coyle) — psychological safety and team health
• "Measuring Employee Engagement" (Gallup) — measurement approaches
• "Organizational Health" (Harvard Business Review) — systemic health