Spotify Health Check

Everyone loves Spotify, right? We hear of Spotify being the Nirvana of Agile Development because they have all sorts of wonderful processes that fit right into the”Agile” landscape. Well, in my department we had heard of the Spotify Health Check. This is a way of measuring and visualising how your team is doing. It gives the team a sense of where you can improve on things such as teamwork, health of codebase, team mission and learning.

We tried it. It’s quite a convoluted process and the team soon drifted away from it so we thought we would try something else. Step forward our Team Happiness survey.

An Alternative

The Team Happiness survey is a set of 7 questions that we answer once a month. Each question has a “how much do you think you do…” flavour, with the answers being “least” to “most”. The survey is done using Survey Monkey and is totally anonymous. The results are collected and weighted to produce a trackable score and we can then use the results as data in our Retrospectives.

The idea came from “Creating Great Teams” as part of how they monitored the teams after they had self selected. We’ve taken their health questions and added to them to get our own model. Here are our questions:

The Survey

Thinking of the previous month at work. On a scale of 1 to 5 (1 least, 5 most), how do you feel you…
1) Are doing meaningful work (purpose)
2) Are allowed to focus on one thing at a time (productivity)
3) Have direct influence on how we work (autonomy)
4) Work in a team where people support each other (support)
5) Work in a team where people challenge each other (challenge)
6) Have been able to learn new skills (mastery)
7) Can be creative at work (creativity)

So far we’ve had a few eye openers (to do with team mission) and somethings that aren’t a surprise (such as multi-tasking and focus). I’ll keep you posted on our progress with this.