One of the dynamics that I have observed while working in a great many organizations over the years is this: when leaders say that they care about employee engagement and satisfaction, there is often ample evidence to the contrary. One of the most obvious signs of this gap between words and deeds is apparent when it comes to what benchmarks organizations choose to measure themselves against.
Team Health Checks are an example of a technique that can help provide insight into a wide range of topics that can have a material impact on employee happiness and satisfaction, and they can also be a part of the measurements and metrics that organizations choose to collect. Another challenge that we face is that many more traditional measures are lagging indicators, which in practice means that we might not discover there are issues we need to address until things have gone significantly off of the rails. By using Team Health Checks, we have an opportunity to get visibility into what’s going on in a team’s context, and/or across a group of teams, at a particular moment in time.
Team Health Check Anti-Patterns
Before discussing examples of Team Health Check technique, let’s consider ways in which Team Health Checks can do more harm than good. Andy Cleff offers some excellent advice in his blog post Agile Team Health & Morale Checks:
- “A health check model is not a competition nor a comparison across teams. If team A is mostly green and team B is mostly red, that doesn’t mean team A is “better”. It could just as well mean that team A has a simpler context or a more optimistic outlook, or that team B is more honest about their struggles. Either way, the model and visualization tool is about support and improvement, not judgment. The organization’s attitude should be ‘how can we help?’ and not ‘why are you guys worse than the others?’
- This is not an incentivized model — there’s no reason for a team to want to game things just to ‘look good.’ Our teams intrinsically want to succeed and will perform as well as they can under given circumstances. This model is meant solely as a tool to help boost and focus team improvement efforts, for the sake of improvement alone.
- ‘Done.’ Like everything we do, inspect and adapt. If this model helps teams, keep doing it. If…
