Team Health Checks, also known as Squad Health Checks, are a powerful tool for agile teams to gain self-awareness, identify opportunities for improvement, and define action items that can lead to continuous improvement. Traditional sprint retrospectives and post mortems let teams reflect on the past sprint but squad health checks give teams a chance to discuss a wide-range of topics that affect how well a team works together.

This short article will explore 7 key ways to get the most out of your squad health checks.

1. Set the scene

Before jumping into the squad health check, it’s essential that the host sets the scene and establishes an environment of psychological safety where each participant feels comfortable to express their thoughts and opinions openly and free of judgement. Remind participants that the goal of this retrospective is to figure out what’s working and what’s not so the team can continue to improve. The team needs to feel like this retrospective is a safe place.

2. Make sure every voice is heard

• Give every participant a chance to voice their opinion. Once the team has voted and the host has revealed all the answers, go around the room and ask individuals to talk about why they voted the way they did. You can go around the room and ask specific people to share their opinion, ask for volunteers to speak up, or some combination of both.

• Start with the outliers. It can be incredibly powerful to start the discussion by calling on those who voted in the minority. Not only does this prevent groupthink but these people often thought about the question in a unique way and will have particularly useful insights to share.

3. Be curious and ask open-ended questions

As the host, the goal is to really understand why people on the team voted the way that they did. You have to be curious, dig deep, and get to the root of the problem by asking open-ended questions.

4. Time management

If you want the team to get through all of the health check questions, you’ll have to be mindful of time and know when to encourage the team to wrap up discussion and move onto the next question. Most teams find that a Squad Health Check takes about an hour and a half to complete.

5. Debrief and follow up

• Team leaders (often engineering managers, product managers, scrum masters, etc) should have a follow up meeting to go over what they learned, define action-items, and determine what next steps should be. Remember that Health Checks are a tool for continuous improvement which means they need to be action-oriented.

• Consider scheduling one-on-one or group meetings with team members to dig deeper into specific topics that need more attention.

6. Watch for trends

• Trends over time: The benefit of conducting regular squad health checks is the ability to look back over time and see how team dynamics are changing. This gives team leaders the chance to focus attention on problem areas or double down on things that are working.

• Trends across the organization: If your organization has multiple teams running health checks, it can be useful to look at results across the teams to see if there are any common trends. For example, if the majority of teams express a lack of understanding of the mission, this might be a sign to leadership to revisit and clarify the mission to make sure it’s clearly understood by all members of the organization.

7. Have fun

Relative to other forms of retrospectives, teams typically find health checks to be fun. And having fun is the best way to create a safe environment where participants feel comfortable in sharing their opinions! Don’t be lame, have some fun.

Conclusion

If done right, Team Health Checks are an incredibly useful tool to add to your regular retrospective routine. Make sure you create an environment of psychological safety, hear every opinion by engaging participants, use open-ended follow up questions, manage your time effectively, debrief with team leaders, and create action-items that lead to continuous improvement. RetroWave was built to let your team run guided Health Checks both remotely and in-person, sign up and get started for free.