Team health checks give you a structured way to measure how your team feels about the way they work together. Unlike retrospectives, which focus on specific events and outcomes, health checks track subjective dimensions over time — revealing trends that a single retro might never surface.
What is a health check?
A health check is a short survey where each team member rates a set of dimensions on a scale. Dimensions represent aspects of team health such as collaboration, psychological safety, technical quality, and workload balance. The aggregated results show where the team is thriving and where attention is needed.
Unpack's health check model is inspired by the Spotify Squad Health Check but adapted for modern agile teams. You can use the built-in dimensions or customize them to match your team's priorities.
Health checks are anonymous by default. Individual responses are never shown to other team members or managers. Only aggregated scores and trends are visible.
Creating a health check
Team admins and facilitators can create health checks from the team dashboard or from the ceremonies menu.
- Navigate to your team dashboard and click New Health Check in the ceremonies panel.
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Choose a dimension template or build a custom set. Unpack provides several
pre-built templates:
- Core Team Health — collaboration, psychological safety, workload, learning, mission clarity.
- Engineering Health — code quality, deployment confidence, tech debt, tooling satisfaction, on-call burden.
- Delivery Health — sprint predictability, stakeholder alignment, scope management, dependency handling, release confidence.
- Optionally add or remove individual dimensions from the selected template to tailor the health check to your team's current concerns.
- Set the response window — the period during which team members can submit their ratings. A window of two to three days works well for most teams.
- Optionally link the health check to the current sprint for cross-ceremony insights.
- Click Start Health Check to open it for responses.
Consistency matters more than comprehensiveness. Pick five to eight dimensions and use the same set for several consecutive health checks. This builds trend data that is far more useful than switching dimensions every time.
Responding to a health check
When a health check is active, team members receive a notification with a link to the response form. Each dimension is presented as a card with a rating scale.
Rating scale
Each dimension uses a three-point traffic light scale:
- Green (Good) — this aspect of our team is working well. No significant concerns.
- Yellow (Mixed) — there are some issues here, but they are manageable. Worth discussing.
- Red (Needs Attention) — this is a significant problem that is affecting the team's ability to work well. Should be addressed soon.
Optional comments
For each dimension, team members can add an optional comment explaining their rating. Comments are especially valuable for yellow and red ratings, as they provide context that the facilitator can use to guide discussion in the next retrospective.
Comments are anonymized in the same way as the ratings themselves. They appear in the results without any identifying information about who wrote them.
Viewing health check results
Once a health check has responses, results are available on the health check detail page. You do not need to wait for the check to close — results update in real time as responses come in.
Results dashboard
The results view displays each dimension with:
- Distribution bar — a horizontal bar showing the proportion of green, yellow, and red ratings for that dimension.
- Trend arrow — if previous health checks included the same dimension, an arrow indicates whether the score improved, declined, or stayed flat.
- Anonymous comments — any comments submitted for that dimension, displayed without attribution.
- Response rate — how many team members rated this dimension out of the total team size.
If fewer than three team members respond to a health check, individual dimension results are hidden to preserve anonymity. The overall participation rate is still shown so the facilitator knows the check did not receive enough responses.
Tracking health trends
The real value of health checks emerges over time. Unpack tracks every health check result and plots trend lines for each dimension across multiple periods.
Trend view
Access the trend view from Team → Health Checks → Trends. This page shows:
- A line chart for each dimension showing the percentage of green responses over the last several health checks.
- Dimensions sorted by trend direction — declining dimensions appear first so they get immediate attention.
- A comparison view that lets you overlay two dimensions to spot correlations — for example, workload increasing as psychological safety decreases.
Using trends in retrospectives
When a health check dimension shows a consistent decline over two or more consecutive checks, Unpack flags it as a suggested topic for the next retrospective. Facilitators see this recommendation during retro setup and can choose to add a dedicated discussion column for the declining dimension.
Share health trend data with your team regularly, even outside of retrospectives. Transparency about team health builds trust and signals that the organization takes these signals seriously.
Closing a health check
Health checks close automatically when the response window expires, or they can be closed manually by a team admin or facilitator.
- Open the health check detail page and click Close Health Check.
- Review the final results summary, including participation rate and any dimensions that are flagged for attention.
- Confirm the close. The health check results are archived and the trend data is updated.
Closing a health check is permanent. Team members who have not responded will not be able to submit their ratings after it is closed. Consider sending a reminder before manually closing a health check if participation is low.
After closing a health check, Unpack automatically evaluates whether any dimensions warrant attention in the team's next retrospective. These recommendations appear in the retro creation workflow and can be accepted or dismissed by the facilitator.