Team Health Index
We live in an ever complex world, with situations changing on a regular basis, keeping in touch with the team’s general health (how they are doing) and focusing on what the real needs are crucial for keeping the wheels oiled and to promote an improvement mind-set.
Ingredients
- Survey Tool
- Spreadsheet Tool
- Presentation Tool
Goal of the Team Health Index
Create a data driven approach to seeing how the team is operating at the moment, with the focus spread across key areas from Personal Development to General Company Developments. Utilising this data on a regular basis to build team health trending and providing the ability to provide additional insights with other topics / projects happening at the same time.
General Overview
The general process of this approach would look like:
- Send a Survey out to the team
- Wait until all team members have submitted their results
- Utilising a dashboard, process the data to build an overview
- Add the relative data points in a friendly and minimal presentable way
- Have a lean coffee round with the team around the results of the Team Health Check-in
- Next Period start with step 1 and see if any improvements have been made
Building a Survey
The survey is broken down into four key a crucial sections:
- Personal Happiness Rating
- Statement Gauge
- Net Promoter Section
- Additional Insights
Let’s go into a little more detail of these sections below.
Personal Happiness Rating
This is a very simple 1–5 rating, 1 Being not Happy and 5 Being super happy.
Question Recommendation: The best approach is usually the simplest one, I would approach it like this “How happy are you currently in this team?”
Survey Settings: The best approach is to use a “Linear Scale” of 1–5 for this question, with 1 being “Not Happy” and 5 being “Super Happy”
Statement Gauge
The Statement gauge is where the “meat” of the Team Health Index shows its value. The statements provide the specific impulses based on specific areas and provide a call for action.
You want to have a wide array of statements which cover all the major aspects of daily life. This could go in the lines of the following areas:
- Professional Development
- Product Roadmap
- Company Direction
- Stress Levels
- Requirements for Tasks
- Personal Feedback being listened to
You need to make sure that the questions are formulated in a way that selecting “Strongly Agree” for example is a positive selection. Look at the examples below:
- Good Question: I agree with the direction the company is heading in right now
- Bad Question: I have concerns about the direction of the company right now
The reason for this is based on calculating the Team Health Index at the end.
Question Recommendations: The question should be something simple, like:
“Would you agree or disagree with the following statements?”
Survey Settings:
You want to use a “Multiple Choice Grid” with the following settings:
Rows — This is where the various statements should be
Columns — This should be as follows:
Strongly Disagree
Disagree
Neutral
Agree
Strongly Agree
Net Promoter Section
The NPS provides another angle of the Team Health, you can combiner’s this with the overall Team Health Index to get a different picture.
The NPS score is plot on a indicator like this one here:
[PIC HERE]
How does this work? Below are some examples how the NPS provides another key metric
Example #1 -
- The Team Health Index is >70 but the NPS is below 0
- This scenario reads that the employees enjoy working on the team and are content but there are some underlying issues why they wouldn’t recommend working on the team to others. This could potentially be related to how the teams composition looks and its something the team has gotten numb to.
Example #2 -
- The Team Health Index is >70 and the NPS is above 30
- This scenario reads that in general the team is in a very good way and that it has a healthy culture which is highlighted by both scores being in parallel
The best case scenario is that the Team Health Index and NPS being in a parallel constellation, if there are any discrepancies this tends to highlight underlying issues and can be utilised with the statements to gain further insights.
Question Recommendation
The question should go long the lines like:
“Would you recommend to colleagues and friends to join the team in its current shape and form?”
Survey Settings
Use a “Linear Scale” from 1–10, 1 being “Not Likely” and 10 being “Very Likely”
Additional Insights
With the above questions you will have everything you need to create a Team Health Index, but you can utilise open questions to gain additional feedback which might help gain some additional insights.
Below are the questions I would recommend at the end to provide this:
What is the reasoning behind your previous answer?
This is a “Long Text” question and should be directly after the NPS question, this will help gain some insights into why the person would or would not recommend people joining the team
Is there anything else you would like to share?
This is a “Long Text” question and just provides an open space for the participant to freely type any additional aspects, topics or points that they would like to get across.
Both of the above question’s results should not be share with the team, but can be utilised when analysing the results and add additional insights.
Building a Dashboard
Once every member of the team has participated in the survey (Team Health Check-in) you can now build a “dashboard” to display the results. You can do this in any way in which makes sense for your team / organisation.
For example, I was utilising Google Slides as the organisation was using G Suite, I used Google Forms for the Team Health Check-in, Google Sheets for the Results and Analytics and then it made sense to have a seamless link to a Google Slides file.
Below is an example on how you can get the NPS Score, Team Health Index and the pest way to display the results of the Statements.
Building the Team Health Index
The Team Health Index is the key value which is used to express where the team is on the spectrum (instrument) and can be utilised to gauge each iteration how the team is developing.
Building the Index goes this way:
- Team Happiness — Add all the values together
- Statements — For each statement you need to multiple the number of ratings by the below numbers:
- Strongly Disagree = 1
- Disagree = 2
- Neutral = 3
- Agree = 4
- Strongly Agree = 5
- Team Recommendations — Multiply the number of each rating by the number of people who picked that rating, for example if 4 of your team picked 7 (in the 1–10 rating) then you would do 4x7. Do this for each of the values and you will have a global number for this part of the Team Health Check-in
So now you should have three sets of numbers, you need to do the following:
- Team Happiness + Statements x Team Recommendations = Large Number
The number generated means nothing right now, what you have to do is create a Benchmark of what the Large Number would be if each of the team selected 5 for the Team Happiness, selected Strongly Agree for each of the Statements and picked 10 for the team recommendations.
Once you have that benchmark, you can then find out what Percentage of the actual results is of the benchmark and that is your Team Health Index.
Below is an example of a team of 7:
this means that the actual result (17808) is 60% of the benchmark (29435), this means for this team of 7 the Team Health Index is 60.
You can then take that number and place it on an instrument like below for example:
Building the Net Promoter Score
A Net Promoter Score is a simple instrument which is used in general Web and Product development to gauge how likely people would be to recommend the service / product and thus is a gauge for how well the service / product is doing. We utilise this as well as the Team Health Index to gain additional insights into the team.
To get the value, follow the below details:
- NPS Score — You need to take the Promoters and subtract the detractors and you have this score, to get there, do the following:
- Detractors = # of participants between 1–6 rating
- Passives = # of participants between 7–8 rating
- Promoters = # of participants between 9–10 rating
- Now that you have the above, turn it into a percentage of the participants
- Now take the Promoter percentage value and subtract the Detractors percentage value
Now you have the value, you need to plot this on the instrument of the NPS, this looks like the following:
Building the Statements Overview
This is one of the most crucial visualisations which will promote action. To build this you need to create a 100% Stacked Bar Chart which would look something like below:
Presenting the Results
The results should be presented to the team without any analysis, but the team should be challenged on the results and as a team they should come up with action items to improve the various aspects highlighted in the whole Team Health Index.
- Organise a 1.5h meeting with the team, you can utilise the next upcoming Retrospective for this topic (utilise a Lean Coffee approach for the later part of the meeting)
- At the start of the meeting, recap the whole premise of the Team Health Index
- Slowly go through the various aspects of the Team Health Index:
- Show the Team Health Index number and explain the general range witnessed so far without naming any other teams, explain what the 100 score means (that if every voted on the far right of the scale [super positive] that is what 100 means)
- Explain the Net Promoter Score that it provides another companion aspect to the Team Health Index from the step above
- Show the Team Happiness scale (1–5)
- Show the Statements data
- Read each statement out and mention if the “negative values” are greater than 50%
- Ask the team which aspects of the Statements should we focus on in the second part of the meeting
- Try and steer the discussion to focus on the yellow/orange/red values which are totalling greater than 50%>
- As agreements are coming in, create topic collector buckets in which ever tooling you’re utilising for your Retro’s. This can be a simple JamBoard, Post-it Notes or FunRetro board
- Give the team 5 minutes to write for each bucket, thoughts, opinions and ideas
- Go bucket by bucket and have the creator of the card read out the details
- Any defined actions add to the Actions list
Future Possibilities
Once you have set-up the tooling for the Team Health Index, it is super easy to repeat the process on a frequent basis. I would highly recommend on a 1–2 month scale to gain insights and to have time to make an impact.
Additional Layers of Abstraction
If your organisation had many layers, you could utilise this data on a team by team basis to present a global “Company Health Index”.
Below is an example on how you could do this:
- Company / Organisation -
- Domain / Studio 1 -
- Team A — Team Health Index (50/100)
- Team B — Team Health Index (60/100)
- Domain / Studio 2 -
- Team C — Team Health Index (10/100)
- Team D — Team Health Index (50/100)
- Team E — Team Health Index (70/100)
To work out the Domain / Studio Health Index do the following:
- Add all the actual Health Index Scores together
- Add the benchmark scores together
- Divide the added actual score by the number of teams
So, for example with Studio 2 it would look like this:
- 130 / 300 would be the scoring and as we want to have this on a scale of 100 we would then take the 130 and divide it by 3 and this will then give us 43.4/100
- Round that to the nearest full number and this would be 43/100 for Domain / Studio 2
You can repeat this for the other areas and then follow the same process to gain the Company / Organisational Health
Trending the Team
If you’re gaining the Team Health Index for a team on a regular basis, you can then trend this results on a chart. With this data you can also make hypoisis based on events happening during that time frame to see if it was a negative or positive impact.
