Health checking is a simple way to gauge the heartbeat of a team. It works by continuously capturing the holistic view of a team by incorporating dimensions covering multiple facets of its makeup.
I was keen to try health-checking with my team over a few quarters. This was a facilitated process to identify problem areas and form an action plan towards good health.
Results
In July, we identified Health of Codebase, Team Fun and Distributed Working as three areas to focus on.
By October, the team had done an amazing job of making significant progress, as the following before and after shows.
Comparing the two:
In summary:
- Two targets improved from amber to green: Codebase Health and Fun.
- The remaining target improved, but needed more attention: Distributed Working.
- No red alerts - nothing has dramatically gotten worse.
- Overall, much moved towards green / good health.
- One untargeted area surprised us with a 2-point increase: Psychological Safety.
- There is a clear thing to target next: Learning.
Core Philosophy
To be clear, this is a facilitated process that empowers the team to solve the problems themselves. It put the team in control of their destiny, with me (as lead) simply supporting and occasionally ensuring organisational alignment.
Such processes should be in the interest of the team, not a management tool to insist on top-down change and optimisation. Teams should be able to use this information to decide on what and how things should change, and be proud to radiate their successes or imperfections without fear of top-down intervention.
How
Health Check Indicators
We shamelessly stole Spotify’s team health check model, and added a few extra dimensions for Psychological Safety and Distributed Working. A basic sense check of psychological safety seemed like a no-brainer. And as a remote company, effective distributed working is top of mind for a lot of people.
Anonymous Surveys
Anonymous surveys work well - people can be honest without being called out. And there is less chance of groupthink.
For the 13 indicators, the survey asks for a red, amber or green response - which is well aligned with gut feeling.
This simple approach keeps completing the survey to a matter of minutes, making it more likely to achieve a 100% response rate.
We also ask participants to not think too much about each dimension.
Visualising Results
Results are captured for each quarter in a visual form and documented in a single place so that it is easy to see changes over time.
Change indicators on each dimension give information at a glance on how things have changed - improved, worsened and by how much.
The priority system is quite simple, yet kind of brutal:
- Good health - if everyone voted it green.
- Urgent - if even a single red vote - it’s a strong signal.
- Amber bucket - the percentage of amber votes determines priorities within.
Digging Deeper & Finding Actions
Now that the priority dimensions are identified, the next step was to dig deeper to detail problems more clearly.
People in the team volunteer to run facilitated sessions around each target dimension - gathering problem statements, brainstorming ideas and building agreement on actions to take.
The key question to ask is:
What action(s) could we take to make big steps towards good health?
Conclusion
There is no doubt these indicators and measures are fluffy - subjective and qualitative. They are not quantitative KPI measures, just a gut feeling from participants.
Whilst quantitative metrics can be useful, the primary aims of this simpler approach are:
- Keep it simple - this is not a research thesis, but a rough gauge of health.
- Generate energy (intellectual and emotional) towards “what good looks like”.
- Encourage self-organisation - a process facilitated by anybody, not just a manager.
- Kick-start deeper conversations for more insightful analysis.
- Easily digestible information e.g. areas of focus, what to celebrate.
In other words, a simple, approachable team health check serves to identify areas of improvement and is the first point of call to then dive into solving specific problem areas. Solving these problems can often have multiplying effects; thus, engaging as many people as possible creates real leverage for big change within the team.
To note, we improved Team Fun by incorporating online socials to play games, adding informal icebreakers to the day, and a face-to-face social throwing axes! For Codebase Health, we identified problem areas and dedicated a tech debt iteration to solve key problems. For Distributed Working, we created async comms guidelines, introduced more rotation and breaks during pair programming, and formed guidelines for elaborating work.