Team Health Check

Weekly team health checks catch problems early. The survey takes under 2 minutes and tracks six validated dimensions: work engagement, psychological safety, goal clarity, organizational support, and stress levels.

Each question comes from peer-reviewed psychometric research. Use this to detect burnout early, track psychological safety, identify unclear priorities, and measure the impact of organizational changes.

What This Measures

Work Engagement (UWES-3): Three questions measuring vigor, dedication, and absorption. High scores across all three indicate flow state. When vigor drops but absorption stays high, that signals burnout: working hard but depleted.

Psychological Safety: “If I make a mistake on our team, it is not held against me.” Google’s Project Aristotle found this factor explained 43% of performance variance across 180 teams. Without safety, people hide problems and avoid risks.

Goal Clarity: Whether people know what to work on this week. Ambiguity creates anxiety. Being busy but unclear on priorities is activity without impact.

Organizational Support: Whether people have the resources to do their job. High workload with support is manageable. High workload without support leads to burnout.

Stress and Burnout: Current stress level with conditional follow-up for high scores. The survey asks what’s contributing: workload, deadlines, unclear expectations, interruptions, lack of resources, team conflict, or organizational changes.

Open Feedback: Optional free-text field.

Question Design

Every question comes from validated psychometric instruments with published reliability statistics.

UWES-3: Work Engagement

The Ultra-Short Work Engagement Scale was developed for high-frequency tracking. Validation studies confirmed reliability (Cronbach’s alpha > 0.77) while reducing survey length by 82% compared to the full 17-item scale.

Three dimensions:

  • Vigor: “At my work, I feel bursting with energy.” Physical and mental resilience.
  • Dedication: “I am enthusiastic about my job.” Emotional connection to the work.
  • Absorption: “I am immersed in my work.” Cognitive engagement.

Someone can score high on absorption while vigor drops-that’s burnout. High vigor with low dedication means energy without emotional connection. The pattern tells you what’s happening.

Single-Item Burnout

Research by Dolan et al. (2015) validated single-item burnout screening against the full 22-item Maslach Burnout Inventory: 83.2% sensitivity and 87.4% specificity.

The stress question uses a 1-5 scale instead of asking “Are you burned out?” High scores trigger follow-up on contributing factors: workload, deadlines, lack of clarity, interruptions, or team dynamics.

Psychological Safety

Google’s analysis of 180 teams found psychological safety was the single most important performance factor. This question comes from Amy Edmondson’s original 7-item scale, selected as the highest-loading indicator.

“If I make a mistake on our team, it is not held against me” directly addresses fear of failure and retribution. Alternative phrasings like “It is safe to take a risk on this team” can be ambiguous in safety-critical industries where “risk” might mean physical risk.

Goal Clarity vs Role Clarity

Role clarity (understanding your job description) is stable. Goal clarity (knowing what to work on right now) changes weekly or daily in dynamic environments.

“I have clear priorities for my work this week” tracks these changes. Lack of goal clarity drives activity without impact.

Organizational Support

“I have the resources and support I need to do my job effectively” captures instrumental support (tools, resources) and socio-emotional support (being valued).

This metric is sensitive to organizational changes. When leadership announces restructuring or policy changes, scores often drop before turnover increases.

Frequency

Run this weekly. Engagement and psychological safety are dynamic states that fluctuate based on team interactions, workload, and interpersonal safety. Annual surveys show you what happened last year. Weekly pulses catch problems early.

Participation drops when nothing changes after feedback, not because you ask too often. Close the feedback loop fast: measurement leads to visible changes within days, response rates stay high.

Weekly pulses enable agility: detect problems, run quick retrospectives, try small interventions.

Interpreting Results

Focus on changes week over week, not absolute scores.

Stable team: Consistently scoring 3.5/5 suggests a predictable environment. Room for improvement, but no crisis.

Sharp drop: 4.5 to 3.8 in one week signals a specific event-bad release, toxic meeting, or destabilizing announcement. Investigate immediately.

Gradual decline: 0.1 points per week over four weeks indicates a systemic issue. Creeping burnout, eroding trust, or scope creep.

Divergent patterns: High absorption + low vigor = burnout precursor. High vigor + low dedication = energy without purpose. High dedication + low absorption = distraction or interruption overload.

Interventions

Targeted responses for common patterns:

Low Psychological Safety

Model fallibility: Leaders admit recent mistakes explicitly. “I got this wrong last week, and here’s what I learned.” This lowers the barrier for others to speak up.

Frame failures as system problems: Use the retrospective Prime Directive-assume everyone did the best job they could with the information they had.

Ask better questions: Replace “Does anyone have questions?” with “What are we missing?” or “Who sees a risk we haven’t discussed?”

High Burnout / Low Vigor

Audit workload: Review Work In Progress limits. Burnout often stems from context switching. Prioritize for single-tasking.

Increase autonomy: Burnout correlates with high demand and low control. Ask what process, approval step, or meeting slows people down, then remove it.

Enforce recovery: State explicitly that no emails or messages are expected after hours or on weekends. Model this behavior.

Low Goal Clarity

Weekly priority sync: Shift team meetings from status updates to priority alignment. Focus on what matters this week.

Connect to impact: Explain why current tasks contribute to broader organizational goals.

High Stress

The conditional follow-up reveals contributing factors:

  • Workload: Review WIP limits, defer non-critical tasks
  • Deadlines: Assess realism, negotiate extensions
  • Unclear expectations: Clarify priorities, provide written guidance
  • Interruptions: Establish focus time blocks, limit meetings
  • Lack of resources: Identify specific tools or support needed
  • Team conflict: Facilitate direct conversation or mediation
  • Organizational changes: Provide more context, reduce ambiguity

One small action per week beats grand plans that never happen.

Action Planning

Review results briefly every week or two (15 minutes).

  1. Share the data: “We’re high on clarity but trending down on energy.”
  2. Ask for context: “What drove the energy drop last week?” Let the team interpret.
  3. One small change: Agree on one experiment for next week:
    • No meetings on Wednesday afternoons
    • 48-hour response time for non-urgent messages
    • Weekly priorities in a shared doc
    • Protected morning focus time

Run the experiment, check if scores shift, iterate.

Response Rates and Anonymity

70-80% response rate is excellent for weekly voluntary surveys. Below 50%, non-response bias makes data unreliable.

If response rates drop, pause the survey and act on previous feedback. More reminders won’t help if people don’t believe their input matters.

Aggregation threshold: Never report individual-level data. Set a minimum of n=5. If fewer than 5 people respond, don’t show managers the data. This prevents attribution and protects against retaliation.

What This Isn’t

Not an annual engagement survey. Not a performance evaluation tool. Not a replacement for one-on-one conversations.

This is a practical screening tool optimized for speed and actionability. The validated short-forms achieve reliability comparable to full-length scales.

Getting Started

  1. Set expectations: Explain why you’re running this, how often, and what you’ll do with the data. This tracks team health, not individual performance.

  2. Run the first survey: Send it Friday afternoon or Monday morning. Same day, same time every week.

  3. Share results within 48 hours: Aggregate data (minimum n=5). Share with the team. Show the numbers.

  4. Hold a brief retrospective: 15 minutes. Ask what drove the scores. Agree on one small change.

  5. Follow through: Do what you said you’d do.

  6. Repeat weekly: Value comes from longitudinal data, not single snapshots.

Research Foundation

Validated psychometric instruments:

  • UWES-3: Ultra-Short Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli et al.)
  • Single-Item Burnout: Validated against MBI (Dolan et al., 2015; West et al., 2012)
  • Psychological Safety: Edmondson’s 7-item scale (Google’s Project Aristotle)
  • Goal Clarity: Organizational behavior literature on role ambiguity
  • Organizational Support: SPOS short-form (Eisenberger et al.)

Each question has published validation statistics. Team health tracking works when it’s fast, frequent, and followed by action.