The Squad Health Check, also known as the Spotify Health Check, as it was popularised by the Swedish music streaming services company, is one of our favourite tools at T5 Digital for fostering team improvement. It gives teams a clear voice to share their challenges and successes, giving them another channel to get the right support from their wider organisation.
I’ve run many Squad Health Checks for different companies and team shapes over the years. I have found that a well run health check can be an engaging way for a team to reflect and improve, even if they’re not used to running the more conventional Agile retrospectives.
Today I want to explore one example of how we used the Squad Health Check model with one of our clients, how it went, and the lessons we learned.
The Squad Health Check (or just health check for short) is a self-reflection tool teams can use to produce a snapshot of their overall state at any one point. Think of it as taking the team’s pulse. The health check high level approach encourages the team to take a step back and assess their current situation, challenges and constraints in a broader way. It complements the more specific, day-to-day nature of retrospectives, as it highlights matters that may not be discussed as often in them.
A health check allows the team and their managers to identify key organisational areas to improve on that may necessitate a more strategic approach. The output is concise so the teams that practice these sessions can easily share it with the people they report into. This allows the leadership team to learn the areas of focus to help improve every team situation, to identify common areas of concern or, on the other hand, areas that are working well across their organisation. However, it is critical for managers not to use the health check as a metric of a team’s performance or to compare them against other teams.
It’s perfectly OK to raise concerns about things the team doesn’t feel empowered to change, but don’t let these dominate the conversation. Even though the output of these sessions could be shared with managers (where they will hopefully act on it), this is also a self-reflection tool to help the team unearth broader patterns of work that may be hurting or helping their productivity and wellbeing. By understanding these patterns, we can identify areas within our control to make meaningful improvements, whilst also documenting larger systemic issues that need leadership attention.
We experimented with slightly different Squad Health Check scoring sheets between the two sessions we ran. This was great as it helped us find the categories that resonated the most with the team, but it also led to a few overlapping themes and a couple of instances where we wasted some time discussing the same problem but in different ways.
This is a natural part of a team’s health check journey though. As we get more experienced running these sessions and find the topics and markers we care about the most, the discussions become more focused and effective.
The Spotify Squad Health Check is most helpful when run periodically. I ran two sessions with this particular client. We were able to establish a baseline in the first one and then compare the state of the team a couple of months later to identify which areas were showing signs of improvement or otherwise!
We gained two main insights from this exercise:
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