Artera’s Guide for Running Effective Team Health Checks

Team health checks are an excellent way to get a pulse of how the team is doing; it’s a good forcing function to get the team to pause for a minute, raise self-awareness, and introspect on what’s working well and what’s not. The aggregation of all team health checks allows for a high-level overview of how teams are doing. The collection of data can be useful to spot any patterns across the organizations or trends over a time period.

What a Team Health Check Is and What It Is Not

Before we begin, we need to be clear on what a team health is focused on and what it is not about. The team health check is different than the end-of-iteration retrospective, as those are focused on tactical execution within the short frame of time of a sprint, and not on the team health over a longer period of time.

What is important to note is that health checks are not used to compare or judge teams or teammates relative to each other. This is not a competition! We do not want any teams to feel that they cannot provide honest feedback or have an open dialogue because it is used against them in any way.

The Tool-Kit (How To’s)

At a high level, we believe team health checks should be:

• Performed quarterly at a minimum.
• Recorded and documented for future reference.
• Used to identify actionable items for the team to execute on.
• Done as a team in person or virtually together, with remote collaborative tools such as Figma, Mural, etc.

This is a template for a team health check that we provide to all of our teams, but we have found that teams adapt and create their own nuanced ways of doing things while maintaining the same categories of discussion.

1. Set up the environment. Get the team together in a physical or virtual room. Our team is a pod of engineering manager, product manager, product designer, and engineers.
2. Use the “Awesome Cards”. We use a set of ~14 “health indicator” cards. Each card defines a specific aspect of team life (e.g., “Our Codebase,” “Psychological Safety,” “Meeting Culture”) with two anchors:
   • Awesome: What great looks like.
   • Crappy: What a dumpster fire looks like.

3. Get the Votes. For each card, the team votes silently and simultaneously. You may discuss as a team each area as you go if that is preferred to keep the dialogue more open.
   • Green: Things are not perfect, but we’re happy here and don’t see major improvements are needed right now.
   • Yellow: We have some important problems that need addressing, but it’s not a disaster.
   • Red: This really sucks and we need to improve it urgently.
4. Analyze the Trend: Is this area getting better, worse, or staying the same since last quarter?
5. Visualize the Results. Make sure the responses and votes are documented in some kind of tracker. Use the data to help the team(s) improve if you want to add some of the areas to improve in your upcoming sprints.
   

The Discussion

Discussions are the most vital portion of the health check! In order for all this to work, we must foster trust by creating psychologically safe spaces. Here are a few rules of engagements we remind our teams to follow:

• No personal attacks
• Avoid generalizations; instead, cite specific examples to elaborate on points rather than making broad statements
• Focus on direct actions that the team can execute on
• Live company values

1. Designate a team lead to facilitate the discussion
   1. It may be helpful for the facilitator to have probing questions in mind to spark discussions. Discussions can be long, so don’t be afraid to set time limits for every question. The facilitator can aggressively stop rabbit hole discussions or take action items to follow up on something
2. Have another person be a scribe to take down notes and action items
3. Go over each question one by one
   1. The facilitator reads the question
   2. Green and red reference points
   3. The majority state and trend
   4. Read any feedback out loud
   5. Hold discussions
   6. The scribe takes notes or makes any action items during this time
4. After discussions but before the end of the meeting, make sure all action items have an owner
5. Take a minute to retrospect, ask everyone to rate how the discussion went at the same time by holding up a number of fingers (1-5 fingers w/5 being the best)
   1. Go around the room and ask each person who wasn’t a five what it would have taken to be a 5

Note: while having discussions can be very fruitful, be sure to follow through with any action items, or these meetings will become less effective!

The Takeaway

In the world of Agile, we discuss team empowerment and this process plays a crucial role. Providing agile teams with tools that enable them to identify what’s working within the team and what’s not is an important data point, allowing them to focus on improving their team. There are usually three types of action items that emerge from this process: first, situations that teams can handle themselves within the team; second, situations where teams encounter challenges with collaboration with other teams; and third, situations where they seek guidance from senior leadership. Identifying all action items and tracking them, quarter by quarter, while improving team operations is the ultimate goal of this process.

Founded in 2015, Artera is based in Santa Barbara, California and has been named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company (2021, 2022, 2023), and ranked on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for four consecutive years. Artera is a two-time Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach.

For more information, visit www.artera.io.

Disclaimer: Artera’s blog posts and press releases are for informational purposes only and are not legal advice. Artera assumes no responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of blogs and non-legally required press releases. Claims for damages arising from decisions based on this release are expressly disclaimed, to the extent permitted by law.