What is a team health check?
A health check is a structured self-assessment: the team rates how it works together, looks at the shape of the result, and picks one thing to improve. Spotify popularised the format in 2014 with its Squad Health Check model — teams there have since run more than 5,000, and the majority still run them at a regular cadence a decade on.
The important word is self-assessment. A health check doesn't measure your team against a benchmark; it makes the team's own perception visible, so the conversation about improvement has somewhere to start.
The six dimensions
| Dimension | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Direction | Does everyone know what matters — and why? |
| Agility | How fast the team turns learning into change. |
| Communication | Is work visible, and do meetings earn their keep? |
| Trust | Whether it’s safe to be honest, and reliable to commit. |
| Autonomy | Can the team act without asking permission? |
| Delivery & pace | Does work flow — and can the pace last? |
Three statements per dimension — 18 in total. Four are deliberately worded in reverse (“Good ideas die waiting for permission”) to counter box-ticking and keep scoring honest.
How to read your score
Each statement scores 1–5; reversed statements flip automatically. Averages become percentages, the six percentages average into your overall score, and the overall falls into one of four bands.
| Band | Score | What it means | Next step |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thriving | 80–100 | The way of working is an asset, not an obstacle. | Protect it — keep feedback loops short and watch for complacency as you scale. |
| Healthy | 60–79 | Fundamentals in place, with clear room to sharpen. | Pick the weakest dimension and run one focused experiment against it this fortnight. |
| Strained | 40–59 | Friction is costing energy and output every week. | Don’t fix everything — agree one behaviour change in your lowest dimension. |
| At risk | 0–39 | The way of working is getting in the way of the work. | Name the lowest dimension honestly, agree one concrete fix, re-run in a month. |
The shape matters as much as the score: a spiky profile — one strong dimension carrying a weak one — is a different problem from an evenly average team. The tool calls this out under “What the shape says”.
What the research says
- Psychological safety was the top dynamic separating Google's best teams — ahead of dependability, structure & clarity, meaning and impact. Google sales teams high in it exceeded their targets by 17%; teams low in it fell short by up to 19%. (Google re:Work, Project Aristotle)
- Only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged — and Gallup attributes at least 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager. Team-level health is where engagement is made or lost. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026)
- Health checks only work in high-trust environments. Spotify is explicit that the data is easy to game — the model is for supporting teams, never judging them. (Spotify Engineering, 2014 & 2023)
- The disagreements are the data. When one person's scores diverge sharply from the team's average, that gap is a better conversation starter than the number itself. (Spotify health-check practice)
How to run it with your team
- Everyone answers privately. No groupthink — scores are only useful if they're honest, so each person completes it alone first.
- Average the scores, keep the raw spread. The mean gives you the headline; the range tells you who sees the team differently.
- Discuss the gaps, not just the lows. A dimension where scores vary wildly is often more revealing than a uniformly low one.
- Pick one fix. Spotify's lesson from a decade of health checks: teams that change one thing improve; teams that plan five change nothing.
- Re-run on a cadence. Quarterly is a good default. The tool stores your last run on this device and shows the delta automatically.
Frequently asked questions
What is a team health check?
A structured self-assessment where a team rates how it works together — direction, communication, trust, autonomy and delivery. Spotify popularised the format in 2014 with its Squad Health Check model; their teams have since run more than 5,000 of them, typically a few times a year, as input for improvement rather than judgement.
How often should a team run a health check?
Quarterly suits most teams — often enough to catch drift, rare enough that actions have time to land. Spotify teams typically run theirs two to four times a year. Whatever cadence you choose, keep it consistent so the trend line means something.
Is my data stored or sent anywhere?
No. Your answers are scored entirely in your browser and saved only to your own device’s local storage, purely so you can compare against your last run. Nothing is transmitted to our servers or any third party.
What does "psychological safety" actually mean?
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term, defines it as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — people can admit mistakes, ask questions and offer ideas without fear of embarrassment or punishment. Google’s Project Aristotle found it was the single most important dynamic separating its best teams from the rest.
Is this a scientifically validated assessment?
No — and it doesn’t claim to be. It’s a self-assessment built on dimensions that team-effectiveness research consistently highlights (psychological safety, clarity, dependability, autonomy). Its value is the honest conversation it starts, not the precision of the number it ends with.
Sources & method
- Google re:Work — Understanding team effectiveness (Project Aristotle) — five dynamics of effective teams, psychological safety first
- Spotify Engineering — Getting more from your team health checks (2023) — a decade of practice; 5,000+ checks run
- Spotify Engineering — Squad Health Check model (2014) — the original model by Henrik Kniberg & Kristian Lindwall
- Gallup — State of the Global Workplace 2026 — 20% engaged globally; managers drive 70% of engagement variance
Method: 18 statements, 5-point agreement scale, four items reverse-scored. Dimension scores are rescaled to 0–100 and banded at 80/60/40. This is a reflective self-assessment, not a psychometric instrument — treat the score as a conversation starter.
Low Communication score dragging the profile down? Meeting overload is the usual suspect — price yours with the Meeting Cost Calculator, or ask the desk how to rebuild team rhythm.
Meeting Cost Calculator → Ask Agile →