Today, I heard Dafna Rosenblum’s (see Dafna’s blog here) talk on the EMIL (Engineering Manager IL) meetup about “Team Health Check”. It was the first time I heard about the concept, so I read more about it.

Spotify developed the team health check concept and introduced it in 2014 (here).  About 6 months ago, Spotify published a new post about “Getting More from Your Team Health Checks”. The post focuses on improving the team experience in this workshop and suggests the following main ideas –

• Customize wisely – tailor the right questions and health checks that fit the team and the organization.
• Dig Deep – Good facilitation is essential to enable more profound conversations. Good facilitation should help to step outside the team’s day-to-day communication patterns and create a psychologically safe place (see here) to raise issues. The post suggests a few strategies on how to do it.
• Follow through – you should follow up and reiterate the topics that were raised in the team health check workshop. That can be in 1-1 meetings, scheduling required meetings, checking your priority or attention, etc.

I found a few online tools to help facilitate team health checks – 

• teamhealthcheck.io – “A free, anonymous, and super simple tool to run a version of the Spotify Health Check Survey. “
• Miro boards – There are multiple miro templates for team health checks – e.g., here, here, and here.

Another tip from Dafna to start meeting (and every meeting) is to start with a quick intake to break the ice and increase engagement. For example, ask the member to describe their mood using an emoji.