Squad Health Check: Get the pulse of your team

As a manager you want to get the pulse of your team, knowing what is going well and what is not working.

Many tools are available to know more about what happens in your team but Squad Health Check is one of my favourite tools. It will help you:

• Follow your team,
• Having indicators on different categories/topics,
• Take concrete actions to improve the situation.

To solve issues that your team is facing you need first to be aware of them and this tool (in addition to other ones) will help you to know them.

How do we organise the Squad Health Check?

It follows these steps:

1. Organise a workshop with your team (same as a retrospective) about the current situation based on the categories (see below). Going through each category, explain them and let the team vote for each one.
2. While your team is voting write the result as the meeting is progressing

All teammate will use traffic light to vote (Red, Orange and Green lights)

- Green doesn’t mean things are perfect. It just means the squad is happy with the situation.

- Yellow means there are some important problems that need to be solved.

- Red means this really bad situation and needs to be improved.

3. Go through the most negative (more red and orange) categories and start an open discussion about the issues.

• For each category, take SMART (Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, Time-related) actions to try to improve the situation.

It is very important, to plan time for you and your time to work on the actions during the next quarter (when planning the next quarter)

Prepare health check report

On your side, as a manager, you need to prepare a report to summarize the health check and the actions that were taken and also to compare the result with the previous health check.

Compare only with your team previous health check and not with other teams (each team has its own context and issues)

• I’m using a small formula to get an average value for each category and to be able to compare with the previous quarter (You can use your own formula):

=((GreenValue * 10) + (OrangeValue * 5) + (RedValue * 0)) / NbOfPeopleWhoVoted

• You will obtain results that you can classify like this.

Result > 8: 🟢 Good Results for this category.

8 ≤ Result ≤ 6: 🟠 Average results for this category.

Result ≤ 6: 🔴 Bad results for this category.

Share the report with the team and ask for feedback (feeling of the team about the health check, ideas for new categories if needed ...)

Don’t forget when you take notes, the results, comments and complains are anonymous.

Categories:

Here the categories that we are going through (Inspired of what is done at Spotify) and the meaning of the 🟢 and 🔴 votes:

For the Manager Support category, I suggest doing this one without the manager present in the room, to make the people more comfortable to vote without any pressure.

Pieces of Advice

If you gonna test this type of retrospective, here’s some advice I had from my experience:

• Be clear about the objectives of this meeting. We want to find improvements and raise issues not pointing people or judgement some of the teammates.
• You can add categories that suit your job specificities or company but no more than 10 categories (If you have a lot of categories, you will not have the time to take actions and it is the most important part).
• Involve your team in the questions, categories.
• Take action, share the results and compare them (do not compare multiple squads because each squad has its own context, just compare your squad results between quarters).
• Get feedback from the team and try to improve each time.
• Don’t forget to review the actions that have been taken during the Squad Health Check every 2 weeks or month during the normal retrospective.
• You can find here (from Spotify) the basic support from squad health checkthat you can print and use.