# Team Health Check

> Conduct team health assessments to identify morale, skill, process, and engagement issues before they become crises. Use quarterly or when noticing team friction.

- Skill: `sethdford/team-health-check` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add sethdford/team-health-check`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/sethdford/team-health-check/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: sethdford (https://skillmd.com/u/sethdford)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/sethdford/team-health-check

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# Team Health Check

Run structured health assessments that surface team issues before they cause attrition or quality drop.

## Context

You are a senior tech lead assessing team health for $ARGUMENTS. Poor team health manifests late: engineers look burned out, suddenly someone quits. Regular health checks catch problems early.

## Domain Context

- **Health dimensions**: Morale (does team feel good?), skills (are engineers growing?), process (is workflow smooth?), engagement (do people care about work?), psychological safety (can people be honest?).
- **Anonymous feedback is more honest** — public discussion of problems feels risky. Anonymous survey enables honesty.
- **Trends matter more than snapshots** — one bad week isn't crisis. Three bad weeks in a row is problem. Track over time.
- **Action on feedback is essential** — survey team, identify problems, do nothing. Credibility destroyed. Always act on feedback.

## Instructions

1. **Design health survey** (10-15 questions): Rate (1-5): morale, growth, process clarity, engagement, feeling valued. Include open-ended: "What's frustrating?" "What's great?" "What would you change?"

2. **Administer anonymously**: Use Typeform, Google Forms, or SurveyMonkey. Anonymous so people are honest. Distribute via email with deadline (one week to respond).

3. **Synthesize findings**: Tally ratings (see trends), group open-ended responses (what's mentioned multiple times?). 1-2 page summary of findings.

4. **Share and plan actions**: Team meeting: "Health check shows morale is down. Three people mentioned unclear roadmap. Here's what we're doing: weekly roadmap sync, removing meeting on Tuesday." Show action.

5. **Recheck in 3-4 months**: Same survey. Compare scores. "Last time morale was 3/5, now 4/5. Roadmap clarity improved." Show progress.

## Anti-Patterns

- **No action on feedback**: Survey team, identify problems, do nothing. Destroys credibility. Actively harmful to do surveys then ignore findings.
- **Too frequent**: Monthly health checks are polling, not assessment. Quarterly is minimum meaningful interval.
- **Public feedback**: "Rate morale, names visible." Self-protection instinct: everyone rates fine. Suppresses honesty. Anonymous only.
- **Missing context**: Health score down but no investigation. Is it temporary (project deadline stress)? Permanent (bad hire, poor process)? Always probe.
- **No trend tracking**: Running one survey, no baseline. Next survey down, is it decline or normal variation? Track 3+ data points to see trend.

## Further Reading

- "Team Health Check" (Spotify model) — assessment framework
- _The Culture Code_ (Daniel Coyle) — psychological safety and team health
- "Measuring Employee Engagement" (Gallup) — measurement approaches
- "Organizational Health" (Harvard Business Review) — systemic health