How to run team health checks
Unhealthy teams don't ship. The monthly health check is a structured five minutes per person that tells you, well before any retro does, where morale is going.
Why it matters
Health is the leading indicator for everything that comes later, velocity, quality, attrition. A two-month dip in team sentiment shows up as a velocity drop a quarter later, attrition six months later. Catching it monthly lets you intervene cheaply.
Step by step
- Schedule. Monthly cadence per team. Fixed day; don't let it slip.
- Open the team's Health Check board. Standard cards: Mission & Goals, Pawns & Players, Speed, Quality, Health of Codebase, Suitable Process, Support, Fun, Learning, Easy to Release.
- Each team member votes. On each card: green / amber / red, plus optional comment.
- Aggregate. The board shows the sentiment plus a comparison to last month.
- Discuss in the next team meeting. Reds first, what's the smallest change that would move it to amber by next month?
- Track trends, not single months. One red is noise. Two months in a row is a signal.
- Share the trend with leadership. That's how they spot patterns across multiple teams.
What good looks like
- Run on a fixed day every month
- ≥ 80% participation per team
- Reds discussed within a week of the check
- One concrete action per persistent red
- Trend reviewed across teams at portfolio level
How Tenhaw runs this
Health Check boards run the standard 10-card model with green/amber/red voting in-product. Results trend month-over-month, and the Outcome Coach uses team health as one of its weekly briefing signals. A 0.4 sentiment drop surfaces in the leader's inbox before a velocity drop ever shows up in dashboards.
- Tenhaw Health Checks
- Tenhaw team trend analytics
- Tenhaw Outcome Coach (uses health signal)
In Tenhaw → Health Checks. The Coach uses health trend as one of its signals, a 0.4 drop month-over-month surfaces in your weekly briefing.
Run this in your team
The Tenhaw product enforces every rule in this playbook so it doesn't sit on a wiki gathering dust. Try Tenhaw or book a working session with the founder.